MIREILLE WENGER: Port of Cape Town cries out for private sector investment

Each morning on my way to work on Philip Kgosana Drive, with its beautiful view of Table Bay, it has become something of a ritual to take advantage of the bird’s-eye view of the harbour and carefully study what is happening at the Port of Cape Town.

I look to see how many vessels are berthed, how many are in the bay waiting to berth, track vessel turnaround days, and especially look for the rubber-tyred gantries, because I always get excited when they are hard at work.

This interest has been spurred by the unquestionable reality that the economy of the Western Cape, and SA, will not grow and create jobs unless our ports are working well.

While we have had some challenging times at the Port of Cape Town in recent years, it is promising to note some improvements over the last 12 months, and I would like to acknowledge and thank all stakeholders for enabling this.

There have been improvements in key performance indicators such as average vessel waiting time at anchor and the average turnaround time, and we have seen some additions to key infrastructure, such as the introduction of the ninth ship-to-shore crane.

The Cape Town container terminal deserves praise for achieving a record performance of moving almost 20,000 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in the week starting July 18 2022, and night shift utilisation increased to 17% in the second week of December, up from just 4% previously.

This is good news. However, we know we must do far better if we are to successfully stimulate high levels of export-led economic growth in our region. We need to do the following :

• Ensure far higher levels of private sector participation in the Port of Cape Town, including in the container terminals. We need to increase infrastructure investment dramatically, and the private sector has a role to play in realising this. We are encouraged that the ports of Durban and Ngqura have been earmarked for private sector participation, and we contend that the Port of Cape Town must be added to the list as an Operation Vulindlela priority. If we get this right we can emulate the successes of the Port of Maputo in Mozambique and the Port of Cartagena in Colombia;

• Build on our collaborative approach to unlocking efficiency at the port, with a focus on equipment augmentation, reduced transport congestion and establishing improved two-way communication across the logistics value chain. This approach has been a great success, demonstrated by our hosting of the fourth Port of Cape Town stakeholder workshop this month, which included Transnet’s senior leadership;

• Ensure the integration of logistics planning among agencies, including night shift utilisation, with improved co-ordination across the value chain. This must include shipping lines, so that we can ensure increased calls at our ports. In this respect wind mitigation will be particularly important. This was evident this past month, when we lost up to 30% of operational capacity because of strong winds.

If we continue to work together towards these objectives I am confident that we can achieve our high-growth scenario at the Port of Cape Town, which our research says will contribute an additional R6bn in exports, about 20,000 more direct and indirect jobs and more than 0.7% added to the Western Cape GDP by 2026.

It is extremely promising that key stakeholders in the port “ecosystem” agree that this is a way forward, with the need to identify a private sector participation model that will work for the Port of Cape Town. I now look forward to the next steps in making this happen, because as with everything in SA, success will only come through action.

• Wenger is the Western Cape’s finance & economic opportunities MEC.