Building Pathways of Progress part 1

0:05
Welcome to another episode of the Unitrans podcast. Today we want to have a candid conversation about the infrastructure and regulatory realities shaping logistics across Africa. Progress on the continent is often shaped by structural challenges such as road quality, regulatory complexity, and uneven enforcement. Joining me in the discussion is CEO of the RFA (Road Freight Association), Gavin Kelly and Consumer Executive, Gareth Jones. Please share with us who you are and the role you play within the broader logistics and industry ecosystem. We look forward to having a discussion around collaboration between industry associations and government as critical pathways to progress.

0:48
Welcome. Gentlemen.

0:50
Please tell us a little bit about yourselves and the role that you play.

0:53
It’s Gareth Jones. I’m the Executive for the Consumer division within the Unitrans business and we look after end-to-end logistics across the supply chain that involves transport, warehousing, freight forwarding and clearing as well as certain poultry aspects – a specialised poultry unit that we look after.

1:14
So specialised poultry isn’t a big turkey.

1:18
My name is Gavin Kelly. I’m the Chief Executive at the Road Freight Association. The Road Freight Association is a private association. A lot of people think because of its acronym RFA, it is similar to the RAF and the FRA and the RNTC and all those sorts of things which it isn’t. It’s made up of members who join it voluntarily. We have two legs; we have a trade leg. We look after operational matters for our members and then we have an employment style of leg which looks after negotiations between the employer and the employees. So that’s what the RFA is.

1:59
The first question to you, gentlemen, is infrastructure and regulation are often cited as key constraints on efficiency. From your perspective, where do the most persistent operational challenges lie for logistics operators in Africa?

2:14
So, we’ve got 14 days to have an answer just to the first part of the question. It’s a very good question because one, I suppose South Africans are quite ready to shoot from the hip and you start blaming government for what’s going on.

2:29
The first thing we need to understand is the very backbone of logistics if you want to move something and what drives the mode that you use. That’s the word that we find running around everywhere. You have road, rail, sea, and air. Those are called modes, in the greater scheme of things. And what mode do you choose to move the goods or people? It’s around the efficiency of the mode. It’s not always about how cheap that mode is, it is about how efficient it is. Dwell times, travelling times, etc.

3:04
In South Africa we’re sitting with a problem. Where the only mode that’s efficient, really, in terms of land-based transport, is road. I’m not going to bring air and ships into it. If we could get ships riding up the N1 that might be interesting, but we can’t do that. And I don’t want to talk about air because it’s a specialised mode in the greater scheme of things.

3:24
First of all, it’s around the efficiency of a mode and how much the government and private sector in partnership, which we haven’t quite got right, is prepared to invest into that mode to look after the efficiencies for the benefit of everybody, not just certain operators.

3:43
And secondly, it’s around making sure that just like this table, the playing field is level that the rules that are in play – we’ve got plenty of rules. We call it legislation, policy, or best practises. In some areas, like in the fuel industry, there are far more rules that apply, outside of government regulation, but that this playing area is level and everybody plays by the rules. We haven’t got that right either.

4:13
Now you have these huge discrepancies between certain sectors or certain infrastructure pieces in this jigsaw puzzle of logistic chains and in terms of how operators or people who ply their business in these chains operate and what they do in terms of what is required and not allowed.

4:35
I love how you took a 14-day thing and you summed it up.

4:40
That’s just the first paragraph, Gareth, what are your thoughts?

4:47
I think from an infrastructure perspective, if you bring it back to, as Gavin put it so well, the modes of which people you class to move goods. Not only is it about the modes in the legislation around the usage of those modes, but it’s also about what modes should be more efficient as well. How do we promote those modes and how do we then look after the individuals and create the right partnerships, collaboration, systems, technologies, whatever else it may be, to try and support what should technically be a primary mode?

5:28
Certain commodities should be able to be moved on certain modes, more efficiently than others. And that’s where I think a lot more thought needs to go into the total chain and the total overall supply chain within any country, not necessarily just South Africa and Africa, but you really need to look at the type of product, or the mode that should be utilised for that product versus what is currently being used for that. And then, instead of investing in just a particular mode because it is the best way currently, it’s more around what should we evolve it into to be the most effective and most efficient, as well as deliver the best kind of cost, to serve with regards to those sorts of products and environment.

6:16
Let’s talk a little bit about regulatory complexity and enforcement. How do regulatory complexity and varying enforcement practises affect day-to-day operations and planning in the logistics sector?

6:30
If you make regulations too involved and too difficult, I don’t think it’s only in South Africa, but you see South Africans as soon as something becomes difficult to comply with or onerous to comply with, they don’t. They move away. They find ways of, in Afrikaans we have a saying, “’n boer maak ‘n plan,” which in English is “a farmer makes a plan” or you make a plan to get around it, to get past the hurdle, to find a way to get through the hurdle, under the hurdle. When it’s very complex and that complexity takes away from the efficiencies because that’s what we’re about. We’re about efficiencies and the ease of doing business. Then it gets ignored, but layer on top of it.

7:15
So let’s look at something quite simple in the road freight logistics area, which is the movement of what we in South Africa call abnormal loads. Around the world they call them oversized loads or large loads. Loads that traditionally wouldn’t be moved by a normal truck, you have to have a truck with a whole lot more wheels. It might need to be wider, lower, or longer, whatever the case may be, very clear set of requirements for this. Yes, you can move whatever you need to move. Get a permit from your local province. They’ll issue you with a permit. And if you meet the requirements for this specific load, for example, this is a 100-tonne load, which you wouldn’t put on a normal truck because it can’t carry 100-tonnes of payload. I can carry maybe 28 or 32 depending on what you’ve got.

8:07
If you’ve got a vehicle that can spread the mass, the weight of this load across its axles so it doesn’t do road damage, we’ll give you a permit, and you can move. You would think that you would be able to apply for this online. I mean, how difficult is this? I can give you all the information. I can tell you where I want to go to and where I’m coming from. If you want to have information about the load, I can get that from the guy who’s asked me to move it. This is not mine. Generally, nine times out of ten, it’s not my load. I’m moving for a customer.

8:44
It takes three or four days to get this permit. And in South Africa we’ve got nine provinces. If you really got your trip banned, you go through all nine, all that’s on you. Quite often you would need to go through at least two. Sometimes it’s four or five. If you’re moving something from one of the harbours like Unitrans does, and you want to take it up through to Zambia, you’re going through 5 provinces because believe it or not, there’s a little piece of Mpumalanga that’s just between Gauteng and KZN and you’ve got Limpopo. You have to get one of these permits from each one of these provinces.

9:23
To get these guys who issue the permits to understand that there’s actually a timeline here. As you move through the provinces, you’ll need a permit for this province and the next permit for this province. Otherwise, your vehicle stands at this invisible border between the provinces because you don’t have this permit to move through this province. If you make this process onerous with a whole lot of requirements, why can’t I submit all my documentation to a single point where all the provinces are, where I declare I’m moving through KZN, Mpumalanga, along Gauteng, Limpopo, etc. All the provinces can see it and say, OK, here’s your fee, you’ve got your permit and you can move, one time. Now I’ve got to go to four or five different offices, supply this application, and believe it or not, one or two provinces will have something else they want over and above what you’ve brought. “Oh no, but you can’t move on this day or no.” Good legislation, the best of intentions, but it becomes onerous to try and get this through the various guys who are responsible and then layer on top of that…

10:48
We’re a member organisation. One of the biggest problems we have operationally, on a daily basis, is law enforcement, the traffic police moving out there, who see trucks as cash cows. They see the ability to fleece money off the driver and he’s just the driver. It’s not their load or their truck. They are working for someone or to take other monies out of this whole process which they deem necessary for them to perform their tasks.

11:21
If you have onerous requirements and you have a law enforcement process that is open to corruption and coercion and differs in Gauteng, you require the light for this here, but next door you’re not. If you forget to remove the light or vice versa.

11:45
Unitrans is involved in lots of mining. In Gauteng, you’re required to have an orange lamp on top of your vehicle but in Mpumalanga, don’t leave the mine where this orange light’s still on the top of your vehicle, then they fine you for an unauthorised lamp. You’re coming out of a mining area; you are probably going to another mining area – so you have all of these things that start to play. And that’s when it starts to happen that people start saying, well, I’m not going to comply with this. And you end up wasting time trying to get administrative things in place that should be simple and straightforward.

12:32
If you take what Gavin said and compound that throughout operations across the whole of sub-Saharan Africa and you look legislation and rules in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Madagascar, Lesotho, Eswatini, and each comes with a subtle nuance as well. If you take the simplicity of a pencil and you’re trying to import a pencil into a country, is it stationary or is it a wood and lead product? How do you declare that? One country might see it as one aspect and the other might see it as another.

13:15
When it comes to regulatory compliance and effectively declarations and paper works and the complexity within what is required, most certainly the more complex you make it, the less likely people are to articulate it well enough and utilise it effectively and they’ll work around the system. And when working around the system, that opens it up for law enforcement agencies to find areas within what you do. The reality is that regulatory should be compliance to a point.

13:52
And that’s got to also look at from a governance perspective, not only the product, but also from a financial perspective, the kind of intricacies of forex and monetary policies with regards to taxes, tariffs, duties, etc. on the country’s behalf. Those things are necessary and stimulate trade as well. Those are all complexities that if you make it easy to deal with, then people are going to deal with you more often. And the easier it is for everybody to understand, the less grey there is in the system within which people can then try to operate within the greyness.

14:39
From a financial perspective as well and at a working capital level, if you have to work around these delays and timelines and regulations impacting on your business, it does create excessive cost from a supply perspective and from a total channel perspective. Because effectively, you’re going to pay and the consumer will ultimately pay because those costs just get escalated through the value chain.

15:06
And at the same time, with regards to those costs being impacted, you also have a time delay, which means that people actually have to try and create more reserve for more product because of the imbalance of the amount of time it is taking the product to make its way through the total supply chain. It’s a significant impact through the entire value chain, both at a cost and time wastage perspective. And ultimately it hits the consumer.

15:34
Within this process, that we have this reality, you start to get players who no longer want to comply with the various things, and they actually subvert and undercut the industry. Good example is the “foreign drivers.” It’s a very emotional thing. No one is saying that foreign people with the right documentation can’t work in South Africa. That’s what we are saying.

16:04
If you’ve got foreign drivers, for example, I’m picking that because that’s topical in this industry and they have the work permits, it’s fine to employ them. Why? Because they will get the same package deal, the same benefits as a South African citizen. But if I now start employing undocumented foreign individuals who are illegally in the country (and there’s a reason they’re undocumented), I can now start running an operation that undercuts to a great degree what the compliant operators are trying to do. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in road freight or the bus industry. It happens in fuel too. If I start using bad fuels, fuel can be anything between, depending on the trucks you’ve got and the type of operation you’ve got, anything between 33% and 60% of your daily operational costs.

17:11
Labour can be 48% of your cost. If I can take that 48% and cut it down to an 18% by not following the rules. And if the process to get everything in place, work permits, etc. is so complex and is mired with pitfalls like, if you pay me R10 000, just look at what’s coming now out of Home Affairs, you start finding players in the market who start employing this sort of employee. Not being derogatory. I mean that’s probably a better way of explaining that: Employing employees that they can pay instead of the basic of R15 000 a month per example, they can pay them R3000 a month. What happens to your logistics industry?

18:04
If I’m going to cut on labour, I may as well cut on safety, on maintenance, on fuel. What stops me from cutting everything back that would normally have in play? An operator who plays by the rules, has good standards of safety. Having safe drivers and safe trucks is not cheap. That’s really the problem – if we don’t ensure that there’s a level playing field. And that’s a role of government. Not to be a player but to be the referee.

18:47
We spoke a little bit about partnerships earlier on and I think you mentioned collaborations. Tell us, what role do industry bodies and partnerships play in supporting dialogue alignment and practical improvements across infrastructure and regulation?

19:03
Industry players, let’s call it third parties interested in the industry that are not necessarily directly commercially involved in the industry, if you’d like to call it that or at least form a body of a mutually agreed view for an industry to have constructive discussions with government. If you have any one individual leading it as a singular objective, you might find that it becomes quite commercial in intent rather than industry benefiting. Having an organisation like the RFA, even though it is private, but there’s also the NLCC that’s been set up, there’s other bodies that engage the government and industry to try and find ways in which to make the entire industry more efficient.

20:00
Also provide better line of sight for everybody within the industry around how things are being managed: how particular channels are being managed, how border posts are being managed, any particular tech innovation and just keeping everybody on the same level in the same playing field. It’s also good for industries to have an agenda around where it is heading to and have a growth objective into the future, that we can contribute to with regards to working with government in any format with regards to public private partnership or through any other governing bodies.

20:36
I think it’s important that there is a mutually beneficial view where you have both industry as well as government and then any other bodies pertaining to that, having joint accountability for the success and an overall goal, which should be ultimately beneficial to the citizens of any country.

20:57
So the RFA – none of the people who work for the RFA full time have a transport company. We might have been involved in transport to various passages of transport in our past, but none of us have a transport company that competes with our members. That’s important. There are a number of transport associations in South Africa, actually five, but the RFA is the only one where it is actually independent. It exists as a body, staffed by people who don’t have transport industries. The others have people who work in the transport sector and who actually have transport companies and are looking for work.

21:39
One of the challenges that the RFA has, especially from SMME’s and micro-medium type operators, they come to the RFA looking for contracts and looking for work. We don’t do that. We don’t play in that arena for a myriad of reasons. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that you need some sort of a grouping of an organisation that can speak to government from a collective point of view.

22:07
The RFA has 570 odd members, which equates to about 2500 companies. We can go to government and say that we’ve spoken to our members about various things and there are various things that come up and this is what the road freight industry is suggesting or proposing in terms of this, that, or the next thing. So, a couple of things, crossing the borders…

22:37
When I started working at the RFA, to cross a border, you brought a pack of documents like this to a customs official set. There were rows of customs officials. This individual would sit at that border and go through this pack of stuff to try and ascertain what you had on board, what duties were payable, whether you needed SAT 500 documents and the trucks would stand at the border for hours. Actually, for days. You had this driver sitting at the border. And if you sat at the border for seven days, you still paid the driver, you still had insurance on the vehicle. The vehicle went across the border and was coming with a return load. You needed to meet that date and time to bring a return load, otherwise you lost that load and try and get that load from that customer again is not going to happen. The RFA pushed the process of what today is known as electronic clearing or pre-clearing.

23:42
We’d said there must be a process for those who want to play by the game. It was called an electronic manifest, and I only recall that that document actually was drawn up by the RFA. Today in 2026, we’ve got very good relations with SARS customs. When issues happen at borders, we can get involved and do proposals as to perhaps you need to do this or that. So, the RFA goes and speaks on behalf of Unitrans and other operators.

24:18
It’s this association saying, it’s all our truckers we want out. We could fly drivers out, get the trucks later, whatever the case is, get food and water. We can go to people and say, we went to people in the local town and said, guys, we need toilets, we need food, we need water, we need security, that sort of thing. So that’s really what your industry association needs to do.

24:43
And then bringing in the EVs and saying to government, this isn’t a single operator trying to outplay everybody else. This is the future. This is new technology. This is how the game is changing. We speak to people like Unitrans, get their viewpoints, and go to government and say, from a legislative and policy point of view, how are we going to bring these in? Government say: “We want to go electric.” So where are the charging stations and who’s going to pay for that? You can’t expect Unitrans to pay for that and then everybody else uses it. When are their trucks going to get to charge? That’s the type of role why you need an association.

25:36
You hit the nail on the head in terms of the need of an organisation such as the RFA. Thank you so much, Gareth. Thank you so much, Gavin. Tune in next week as we continue this very interesting conversation about logistics in Africa.