Helen Zille explains why government has such a hard time with Uber

Uber can’t seem to stay out of the news. Today it emerged that Uber partner drivers in Johannesburg are being threatened and harassed. Last week meanwhile, the company’s South African operations launched a campaign urging Cape Town authorities to push through a number of operator licenses for its partner drivers.

In the wake of the latter, Western Cape premier Helen Zille has written an official blog post, detailing why governments seem to struggle so much with disruptive technologies like Uber.

In the post, Zille admits that she’s a fan of the service, saying that “many parents (including me) sleep better at night knowing that their kids will ‘Uber home’ rather than take risks after a night out”.

Given that, she says, it “came as a shock to discover that over 200 Uber taxis have been impounded by the traffic police since the beginning of the year”.

Since then, Zille says, she’s been in discussion with a number of stakeholders and it appears that government has been caught off-guard at every turn.

Read more: City of Cape Town: we fully support Uber operators

“Uber’s e-hailing service ‘does not fall into any of the categories of the National Land Transport Act’, as an official explained to me this week,” Zille writes. “It is also not provided for in the Integrated Transport Plan. And any process to regularise the e-hailing service must follow the requirements of the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act”.

“In other words, Uber is a market disrupter,” she adds. “It was unheard and unthought of when South Africa’s legal framework for public transport was put in place”.

As Zille points out, “this situation creates a crisis for government. Officials must act within the law. But the law doesn’t envisage or cater for e-hailing services. The result is government paralysis”.

The premier and former DA leader also points out that South Africa is not alone in this regard. “Just last week,” she writes, “a court case in the United States concluded that Uber drivers were not self-employed, but employees of the Uber company, a decision with far reaching legal implications”.

Zille also points to an international example in explaining why Uber should do everything it can to work within the confines of current South African law:

Just last month in France, President Francois Hollande called for a ban on the Uber app, following violent resistance against the service in various parts of the country. Hollande is a socialist and believes in market manipulation. We do not. But this does not exempt us from the legal requirement to prevent overtrading and take into account the comments of current licence holders before we issue new ones.

Read more: Uber petitions City of Cape Town to stop hassling its drivers [Update]

The premier says that government on all levels is working at finding a solution:

On Thursday 9 July, there will be a meeting of the Provincial Regulating Entity, where all the verified Uber licence applications supported by the City will be considered. Those who gave false addresses, or other deficient information, will be rejected.

The City has also started the process of compiling a by-law to create a legal framework for the e-hailing industry, while the National Government has started the process of amending Section 66 of the National Land Transport Act, to make e-hailing taxis a sub-category of metered taxis.

Since going live last week, Uber’s petition to the city has been signed nearly 20 000 times.

Image: The Democratic Alliance via Flickr.