13 February 2009
editorial
The furore surrounding the Kgale route is basically one of safety versus profit. The parents of the St Joseph's College students clubbed together and engaged the services of an independent transporter mainly to ensure their children's safety.
On the other hand, members of the Gaborone Taxi and Local Bus Service Association (GTLBSA) that ply that route see it as economic sabotage by transport authorities.
In addition to the issues of the freedom of choice guaranteed to every consumer in this country, we think the parents are raising serious concerns that include safety, customer care and morality. As parents, they bear the onerous responsibility of guaranteeing the safety of their children. After all, should their children sustain lifelong disabilities due to road accidents, or worst still lose their lives, it will ultimately be the parents who have to live with those eventualities.
Further, parents argue that the new arrangement works for them in that students get to school on time. They point to use of uncultured language and the playing of loud and obscene music in the combis. Anybody who uses combis is familiar with the parents' concerns.
We had expected the GTLBSA to seriously address these concerns instead of merely seeing students as their "customers" who have to "compensate for the loss" they make during the day. For a start, these operators must begin to appreciate passengers as genuine customers. Our understanding of a customer is someone who offers you an opportunity to make a decent living in exchange for service. In this instance, the service of transporting the customer safely and comfortably to their destination. Until the public transport operators start treating passengers as customers, in the true sense of the word, the current scenario will replicate itself throughout the country.
In the current climate of utter disrespect for the passenger, transport authorities are increasingly finding it difficult to continue "protecting" public transport operators from the forces of free choice. Consensus has been building over time that the sector is unfairly protected from market forces, in what is basically a free market economy.
The writing is on the wall for the public transport sector to wake up and get their act together, if they are not to lose business to organised and customer-focused operators.
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