IPTS: Baby of soft corruption

With reference to the article, “Threat to withhold funding for bus project” (The Herald, January 29), the IPTS was a baby of soft corruption. Now that it has grown up, it can’t walk properly. (“Soft” corruption – unlike “hard” corruption such as in the courts and under investigation by the Hawks – occurs where qualified people unethically benefit from unsound projects by ostensibly acting above board but “working the system” to keep money flowing which is ultimately to their advantage.)

That is why it is “beleaguered”, a financial disaster and, as the article points out, “suffering from high turnover of staff”. Whether the commuting public is any better off has yet to be shown. The buses run a lot of empty seats.

No one can change an elephant into a kitty cat.

Not with whatever skill a new project manager may have can any planning at his/her level change the way the system was conceived and built.

The die was cast 10 to 12 years ago by planners who should have known better but who allowed the misfit system to be built, while pocketing grand sums in fees.

The term project manager is associated with the building of new infrastructure.

In this case the building phase is over and to continue calling it a project is misleading. The system is now in the operations phase and needs sound operations management. Therefore the system today needs an operations manager, not a project manager, whose task will be to meet promised objectives and turn it into a profitable business.

(It was promised by planners in the beginning that in this new system, operations will be met from the fare box, but today that is only a faint wisp of memory.)

This function needs to be clearly separated from any further construction.

The greater portion of any grant money will likely go to operations anyway, sustaining the inefficient system, paying salaries at the IPTS office, sustaining the operations company Spectrum Alert and compensation fees to owners who surrendered their taxi vehicles.

The operations part of the project needs to be a budget on its own. Any future infrastructure expenditure should be under a project group that is clearly separate from and not reporting to operations.

The debate on whether or not this system should be retained is not dead. It will ultimately be a function of its success, now finally on trial.

Until the operations phase has shown the system is really delivering on its promises, there should be no further construction on the IPTS.

Any plans to add decorations to the cake like fully enclosed modal interchanges, any further construction, should only happen if the original promises of radical transformation have been achieved.

Pierre Joubert, Port Elizabeth