Is South Africa's transport policy 'on the right track'?

(And how the media continues to omit relevant conflicts of interest)

I have been reading South African newspapers closely for over two decades. There was a time when I was happy to pay for them even if I disagreed with a lot of their content. Nowadays I will go out of my way to avoid paying for them: I cannot justify paying to be misled.

I am often reminded of how media outlets, deliberately or out of bad habits, mislead their readers or viewers in my various areas of expertise. This is just a short post to record the latest example.

At the end of June 2024, Business Day published a column by some consultants on the Economic Regulation of Transport Act. The punchline is captured by the headline: “Transport Policy is on the Right Track”. I happened to discover from separate posts by one of these consultants on LinkedIn that the authors of the piece had actually been the consultants responsible for drafting the same legislation. Their column was, in effect, praising the government for turning their own work into law and arguing that would serve the public interest. That would be fine if their role had been declared to readers, but it was not.

As it happens, my first job after graduating with my first degree was in the economic analysis unit of the National Department of Transport. One of the issues the department was grappling with at the time was the structure of the rail sector: I got involved in a number of those deliberations and learned a lot in a short period of time. Much more recently with a co-author I made a very critical submission on the original Economic Regulation of Transport Bill; these criticisms were never addressed. So I can claim some expertise in this area.

Partly because of this background and partly because of my general concern about undeclared conflicts of interest, I submitted a letter to Business Day. I have submitted letters to Business Day on-and-off for two decades. Their letter policy is generally very permissive, which means that it also publishes a lot of highly opinionated pieces from individuals with no expertise. My letter was published, but only in print, and edited to remove concerns about the lack of information about the previous authors’ conflicts of interest.

Unfortunately, this kind of decision - which I have experienced in various ways over the years - supports the conclusion that aside from the initial problem, the media cannot be relied on to acknowledge its failures or ‘self-correct’ even when gently prompted to do so.

Here is the original version of the letter, with the content that was cut from the published version in italics and square brackets:

Dear Sir,

The opinion piece on South Africa's new Economic Regulation of Transport Act refers ("Transport policy is on the right track", 25 June 2024) by Truen, Stern and Townshend. [To my knowledge, and by their own account elsewhere, the authors of that piece were directly involved in drafting the legislation and associated documents as paid consultants. It seems inappropriate that you failed to inform your readers of this fact, which is evidently important for the framing of the opinion piece.]

There are also a range of reasons to disagree with the unsurprisingly rosy assessment presented in the article, which I outlined along with a co-author in our submission to Parliament on the proposed Bill in 2020. One of those is the ample evidence of regulatory cost and failure in the last two decades - energy being an obvious example. Another is that price regulation has nothing to do with the problems besetting these sectors. Very similar proposals were rejected back in 2004, when I worked in the Department of Transport's Economic Analysis Unit, when even the generally pro-privatisation foreign consultants brought in to endorse privatisation-via-regulation declined to do so given the available evidence. The near-collapse of passenger rail and the constant underperformance of freight rail in the interim period may provide an 'anything would be better' baseline, but it does not follow that this is the best or even second-best approach for the country over the medium- or long-term. [Rent seeking is a major risk and in that context clear declaration of conflicts of interest is paramount; please do your readers the service of leading by example in that regard.]

I will write a separate post with more detail on the concerns we submitted to Parliament, which were summarised by the Portfolio Commmitte on Transport this way:

We do not believe the Bill, as it stands, would best serve the public interest, either of transport users or the broader South African public. It could potentially further destabilise sectors through unreliable pricing, creation of complexity where existing capacity was failing (e.g. access) and taking skills from where they were needed (actual operations and management).