Hidden hand behind truck attacks?

Meyerton trucker Andre Diedericks has been transporting cement and fly ash his entire working life, since 1981.

Diedericks, 61, says he knows nothing else. And yet, at the end of October, he was forced to shut down his company, Elf Trans, laying off 100 workers and selling more than 80 of his specialised trucks.

Speaking to the FM, he describes the decision in spiritual terms. One night, he says, he woke up at about 4am and felt as if God was speaking to him, telling him to take this step.

But there were other, equally strong factors that led to the decision.

Foremost among them was the fact that he faced a shakedown, he says, from a new, unregistered "union", SA National Cargo Transport (Sancantra). He says the group bluntly told him it wanted to take over his business, and set about preventing trucks leaving his premises or those of clients.

As the tensions grew, Diedericks says he received death threats.

He says he hadn’t heard of Sancantra until July, when he got a call from a big customer in Lichtenburg. Apparently, the union was demonstrating at their premises, preventing the loaded trucks from leaving.

If this were an isolated incident, it would have been bad enough. But at the same time, Sancantra also started protesting at a number of other cement transport companies.

Videos of these protests are still up on the union’s Facebook page. There, Sancantra’s leader Daniel Mofokeng lays out its grievances — including that it wants an end to labour brokers, and foreigners working as truck drivers.

Without going into the xenophobia inherent in this demand, Diedericks says he didn’t have any foreigners on his payroll anyway.

The FM interviewed Mofokeng two weeks ago; he said he is merely representing employee "grievances" and fighting for better pay. And he denies that he’s tried to take over any of the trucking companies.

Mofokeng says many local drivers are "sitting at home without jobs", and they know which companies employ foreigners.

"We are not attacking trucks, but what I am saying is that all the companies that employ foreigners are known to those drivers. Mostly the attacks will be coming from such people."

He says it’s easy to recruit community members to help attack trucks, as many of them resent the foreigners who run businesses in their townships.

The police appear to have done little to halt the disruption of trucking operations, which has had a knock-on impact on supply chains. The disruption is a major factor in SA’s worsening cement shortage, according to many industry insiders who spoke to the FM in recent weeks.

The Elf Trans experience has also played out at dry bulk transporter Bogdans in Kliprivier, south of Joburg. From July, its operations were systematically disrupted and its trucks subjected to arson attacks.

Founder Bogdan Kazmierczak tells the FM he too received death threats while his trucks were burnt.

On October 12, Kazmierczak obtained a court interdict against protesters blocking his premises. Then, when his workers continued demonstrating despite the interdict, he fired them.

But this wasn’t the end of it. So, in October, he shut the company down temporarily. Jobs were lost — today, Bogdans employs one-third of the drivers it used to.

Things reached a head in the industry in late November, when about 30 trucks were set alight within just a few days.

Though no organisation took responsibility for those attacks, the grievances echoed the refrain that foreigners were "stealing" jobs.

So who, and what, are the real forces behind this wave of violent disruption?

None of the industry sources to whom the FM has spoken — three of whom were afraid to go on the record — believes the attacks are just about foreigners. Many claim it is part of a wider effort at "political destabilisation", though they could provide no evidence.

Who might be behind such an agenda, no-one can say. But what fuels this theory is that it’s not just foreign truck drivers being killed.

One driver who was recently burnt alive near Alberton was a South African, says Road Freight Association CEO Gavin Kelly. He says trucks are often stoned or petrol-bombed at night.

"How do you know who is driving the truck … if it is a South African chappie or a foreigner?" he asks. "If there was a simple labour issue, it would be easy for the government to resolve."

Though President Cyril Ramaphosa set up an interministerial committee to investigate these attacks, it has yet to yield answers.

A statement sent by the committee to the FM suggests that the issue is nuanced, and that the tensions have much to do with competition for new markets. The tensions include the "ownership of trucks, tenders and contracts, and competition between companies for lucrative routes", it says.

But passions have been inflamed by Sancantra and another new organisation, the All Truck Drivers Foundation (ATDF), which both employ dangerous xenophobic rhetoric. Both deny any links to the attacks.

Sifiso Nyathi, secretary of the ATDF, tells the FM: "We don’t know who is causing the violence." Instead, he hints darkly that a "third force" could be involved — but won’t elaborate.

Neither he nor Mofokeng accept that the attacks, while not directly ordered by them, may be a consequence of their statements about foreign truck drivers.

And then there’s the perpetual whispers of the involvement of Julius Malema’s party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).

Kazmierczak and Diedericks quote the protesters as saying they did not want "white management" of the trucking industry, and some claimed to be members of the EFF.

Diedericks says Mofokeng told him: "I am a dangerous man".

Insiders say some cement transport companies offered Mofokeng money to leave them alone, but he rejected the offers.

However, Mofokeng stopped taking calls and could not be reached to comment on the "protection money" allegation.

There is no hard evidence that these protesters really were EFF members, pursuing a political agenda. But in a letter to suppliers widely circulated in the industry, Kazmierczak says he was told that if Bogdans does not comply with EFF demands, "they will do the same to Bogdans Transport as they did to Clicks".

EFF spokesman Vuyani Pambo says the party is not affiliated with Sancantra or involved in truck violence.

"We are not criminals," he says.

Fikile Mchunu, spokesman for the national bargaining council for the road freight & logistics industry, told the FM the organisation heard "rumours" that Sancantra is linked to the EFF, but haven’t verified this.

Either way, in July the bargaining council obtained an interdict against Sancantra and the ATDF to stop them organising, encouraging or inciting anyone to participate in protests "or a ‘national shutdown’ against the employment of foreign nationals in the road industry from July 7 and in future".

It evidently didn’t help.

While the issue of foreign drivers is the wedge issue for Sancantra and the ATDF, bargaining council data shows that just 6,756 of the 44,021 registered drivers in SA are foreigners — about 15%. Mofokeng disputes this figure, arguing that many foreigners are being "exploited" and are not officially registered.

Mike Fitzmaurice, executive director of the Federation of East & Southern African Road Transport Associations, says foreigners are usually hired as cross-border drivers because they are "used to those conditions". And they’re more willing to take jobs that keep them away from home for weeks.

Ofentse Hlulani Mokwena, North West University transport economist, says there may well be more foreign drivers than the registered number suggests. Little is really known about the trucking industry, outside of the registered companies, so there is a "gap inside the market", he says.

Tensions have arisen, he says, as smaller companies enter the industry, disrupting established networks.

For example, Mokwena says, "letters of intent" are frequently circulated on closed networks or WhatsApp groups, detailing what must be transported and what the supplier is willing to pay. Often, small companies bid for the contract — and cheap labour is one way to curb costs. Hence the decision may be to hire foreign or unregistered drivers.

As the trucking industry lurches from crisis to crisis, with the police nowhere to be seen, it’s clear that shakedowns are making SA less competitive — even as the country talks gamely about entering the African Continental Free Trade Area.

Already, before these attacks, SA was losing out to new trade routes that take goods from Walvis Bay or ports in Mozambique and north into Africa, says Stellenbosch professor Jan Havenga. "[Use of] SA’s logistics facilities for Africa’s trade with the world might decline," he says.

It’s one of the reasons, he says, why SA’s share of Sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP, which once stood at 75%, could drop to about 30% over the next two decades.

Diedericks is still optimistic. He says the fact that he and Kazmierczak stood up to Sancantra sent a message that any takeover of trucking companies by protesters wouldn’t be so easy. And, he says, truck drivers are well aware that the protests have cost at least 300 jobs so far.

Truck drivers themselves, for whom the job has become increasingly scary, will be hoping he’s right. A widely-shared picture posted by truck drivers on the SA Long-Distance Truckers Facebook page reads: "I left home with my feet. I don’t know if I come back with them or [in a] coffin."

Nothing is as it seems

The murder of truck driver Gift Msimanga is an apt metaphor for the violence aimed at truck drivers: complicated, without known perpetrators and entailing a different story depending on who you ask.

Rejoyce Msimanga, a Zimbabwean who lives in Hillbrow, got a phone call on September 25 telling her that her brother’s truck had been hijacked in Durban.

An hour later, she received an anonymous phone call. The caller claimed to be from Zakariya Hardware in Alberton, where Msimanga worked, and told Rejoyce that her brother had been beaten to death, and his body was at the store.

Msimanga, 25, leaves behind two children and a widow. He was in SA driving trucks, though it seems he was not in possession of a valid work permit.

Rejoyce said she arrived at the hardware store the day after the call and there was already an advert up for a new driver. "You are supposed to mourn," she says, adding that her heart is bleeding.

While the two new organisations at the heart of the wave of trucking protests — the SA National Cargo Transport Drivers Association and the All Truck Drivers Foundation — lobby against employing foreign drivers, they also claim these foreigners are being "exploited".

Rejoyce has now placed a photo of Msimanga’s body at the hardware store, which she has included in court papers filed in October as part of a legal action to force the Gauteng department of health to release his body and do a postmortem. She says she’s visited the morgue in Germiston, where the body was kept unrefrigerated and was ridden with "worms", but was ignored.

Her advocate, Simba Chitando, from Grayston Chambers in Sandton, says Msimanga was murdered as a direct consequence of being a foreign truck driver.

Chitando has also written to the International Criminal Court (ICC), asking it to investigate violence against foreign truck drivers, and detailing Msimanga’s story. The ICC has acknowledged Chitando’s complaint in a letter seen by the FM.

The day before Chitando appeared in court to argue the case, the Gauteng department of health finalised the postmortem. This showed blunt force trauma killed Msimanga.

In response to questions from the FM, the department last week denied that it kept the body in an unrefrigerated state. It said the decomposition was "normal".

However, the story then takes another dark twist.

When the FM contacted Msimanga’s former boss at the hardware store, Ali Shaukat, he claimed in broken English that Msimanga had stolen a truck, and then fallen 3.5m as he tried to escape over a wall after being told the police were being called to arrest him.

Brig Mathapelo Peters says an inquest docket has been opened and no arrests have been made.

As for Rejoyce, it’s unclear if she will ever find out what really happened to her brother. As Chitando says, for many in SA Msimanga is just another foreign truck driver, whose murder will ultimately go unnoticed.