Melanie Veness, CEO of the Pietermaritzburg Chamber of Business.
I admit to being quite flummoxed on occasion by the kind of “business thinking” that pervades our society.
I was approached a while back by a group of people who transport building materials for a living. They wanted me to insist that the shops selling building materials abide by the rules. When I asked what rules they were referring to, they explained that they believed the deliveries should be allocated to the next affiliated driver in line parked outside the store, and not to particular people selected by the customers and/or the stores.
They were quite upset, because they had gone to the trouble of organising a structure with rules and the stores were just giving business to whomever they pleased. They wanted to know how the stores could do this, when there were drivers parked outside waiting for business. This, they insisted, is how it works in the taxi industry, and how it should work in this instance too.
It took quite a bit of explaining, and I am not sure that the group understood in the end what I was trying to say about free enterprise.
This particular meeting came to mind after a horrifying thing happened on Friday. A dear gogo who works as a domestic in Pietermaritzburg (let’s call her Ella), and who lives in Howick, was almost shot dead. Ella was in a taxi bound for home when gunmen opened fire on her taxi, killing the driver. Apparently, the reason why this particular driver was targeted was because of a disagreement between two associations about taxi routes.
Ella catches a taxi from the residential area where she works to town and then boards a taxi for Howick. She pays R40 a day to get to and from work.
She has always caught her second taxi in town, but now another local taxi association has decided that the Howick taxis should only be allowed to pick up passengers next to the highway because in this way the local association can run another route at an additional R6 a passenger between town and the highway.
The Howick association, Ella was told, rejected this idea, because they have always operated the route this way and because of the additional costs to their passengers – people like Ella would have to pay an additional R12 a day in transport costs, which is totally unaffordable for most of them.
For so many reasons this kind of criminal behaviour is utterly reprehensible, but for the purposes of this article, let’s just consider the business approach.
It appears that if you want to do business in a particular way, and you can’t bully people into agreeing with you, then you simply eliminate whoever stands in your way.
Not only that, but if you wish to influence consumer behaviour, all you need to do is make it dangerous for people to use the service they have always used, and you will achieve your aims, and be able to exploit the poor and innocent further.
I’m utterly appalled.
What kind of society tolerates this kind of behaviour? Another question worth posing, in view of the above, is how much influence this kind of behaviour has on entrepreneurial thinking at grassroots level in South Africa today?
* Melanie Veness is the CEO of the Pietermaritzburg Chamber of Business.
