SONA 2022: Why no ‘private partners’ for the Port of Cape Town?
11 February 2022
The Port of Cape Town continues to face multiple challenges including insufficient infrastructure investment and poor maintenance, causing significant inefficiencies, and compromising economic growth and job creation in the Western Cape.
While I agree with President Cyril Ramaphosa’s sentiment in his State of the Nation Address last night, when he said that inefficient ports can compromise economic growth and compromise businesses, he made absolutely no mention of ‘private partners’ for the Port of Cape Town.
While Transnet will work with ‘private partners’ in the ports of Durban and Ngqura, any talk of private sector investment in port operations in the Port of Cape Town, seems to have evaporated and, we hear, is unlikely to materialise within the next two years.
However, at our third Port of Cape Town stakeholder engagement last week, which brought key representatives of the port logistics chain together, Managing Executive of Transnet Port Terminals, Ms. Wandisa Vazi, mentioned the planned upgrade of the Cape Town Container Terminal from manual to a semi-automated operation by upgrading manual crane operations to remote crane operations to optimise operational efficiency.