Little relief for Cape Town port crisis
The chaos that unfolded at the Port of Cape Town during the peak season shows little sign of abating, data shared by the Western Cape government showed on Wednesday.
While there was a slight improvement in the main container terminal’s performance, peak season backlogs keep growing. Between January 8 and January 14, the average waiting time at anchor was nine days, against a target of one day. This marginally improved in the following week to 7.3 days.
In the first week of this year, the average turnaround time was 17 days, against a target of four days, with only 9,123 containers moved against a target of 20,000.
“The port and logistics network’s role in the economy and growth are paramount,” MEC for finance & economic opportunities Mireille Wenger said.
“We need to see more urgent action to get us out of the crisis now — as well as action to support future growth — if we have any chance at growing the SA economy. The private sector has a key role to play in partnering with government to improve terminal operations and infrastructure investment,” she said.
Congestion at the Durban port came to a head in the last months of 2023, with ships at some point waiting two weeks to dock and 70,000 shipping containers stranded off Durban.
Shipping giant Maersk, which carries much of SA’s imports and exports, in January said congestion at the Durban port had decreased. However, it said little headway is being made at the Port of Cape Town.
Business Day first reported on the challenges besieging the Port of Cape Town and calls by the provincial government to bring in the private sector to assist. One of the challenges has been a lack of rubber-tyred gantries and their engines. The gantries are machines designed to load and unload containers.
In the World Bank’s container port performance index 2022, Cape Town ranked 344 out of the 348 ports surveyed and was in the top 20 that most increased average arrival times.
The port benchmarking report by the Ports Regulator of SA shows that of all SA terminals, ships spent the most time waiting at anchorage to enter the Port of Cape Town.
Head of fixed interest at asset management firm Coronation Nishan Maharaj said the government must allow the private sector to drive the reform.
“There is precedent for this littered across the globe. Even in the US, where the space programme was a crowning achievement by the state and was used to propel innovation in that economy, the private sector has now taken over to drive the next phase of evolution (SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin),” he said.
“Underinvestment and incompetent management have seen a disastrous fall from grace in the internal transport and harbour networks. This has cost the country significant revenue due to lost exports and has also meant that it could not maximise the benefits of the recent commodity boom.”