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Ports Authority of KZN says all Transnet employees have returned to work

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Transnet National Ports Authority in KwaZulu-Natal says all their workers are back at work. Earlier this week, the 12-day-long strike ended with workers accepting a three-year wage deal.

Businesses whose operations rely heavily on the ports were also affected by the strike.

The Port of Durban is the biggest in Sub-Saharan Africa. It contributes 20% to the city’s economy and e11% to the provincial GDP. The impact of the strike was felt at both ports in Durban and Richards Bay.

Prasheen Maharaj, who heads a ship building and repair company, shares his experience on how the strike impacted his business.

“My business is in the ship building and ship repair industry we highly rely on the port not only for our workers to have access to the port for our supply some of them could not get access to the port as roads were blocked but also for the imported components that go into our ships we were waiting for imported components and we couldn’t continue to work we also repair ships and the ships could not enter the port because they couldn’t get services yes it had a negative impact the challenge now is how do we quickly recover from the impact despite all the loss.”

Maharaj is also president of the Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He estimates the impact of the strike on the economy will run into billions of rands.

“We had businesses in crisis. Some of them were in tears, some of them were actually facing closure because it has such a major impact. You know fortunately this was not as bad as the 2010 strike which lasted 17 days which at that time cost the economy R7 billion in 2010. My estimate is about a billion rand a day cost to the economy some people estimate it to be as high as R8 billion a day but I think we need to wait for economists to count the numbers get the data from various role players and work out true costs to the economy.”

Managing Executive for Transnet National Port Authority in the Eastern Region, Moshe Motlohi, says efforts are now underway to clear the backlog in some operational areas.

“The backlog depends on each of the segments we have the container segment was hard hit we had a number of ships waiting to come in as of this morning here in this port we had about thirteen ships that were waiting to come into the port and work however what we are doing right now is to start working on the ships that were caught in the middle of the strike those are getting loaded but we are just going to increase the number of teams that are working on them that should be okay, look I cannot give you the exact but given the magnitude of the strike and our impact yes it would be into millions if it is one or 100, I do not know yet.”

Motlohi says they are prioritising ships carrying perishable goods.

“Mineral segment, where most of the cargo was dependent on the trains, was affected. There were no trains moving cargo. Also in the container sector, some cargo does come by trains but the agricultural sector was also affected. However, we were able to mitigate the impact in that we monitored the temperature of the perishable goods and we are happy to say that none of those got out of acceptable condition we had teams monitoring that and we have preserved the quality of the products to be in its state the focus is to prioritise the products that are perishable.”

Transnet says it is still quantifying the impact of the strike.

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