CT’s mayor urges devolution of rail, unionising taxi drivers or risk repeat of violence and chaos

The star of Cape Town’s young executive mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis continues to rise - with his leadership abilities seen to good effect during the adept handling of the city’s potentially debilitating taxi crisis earlier this month. Like the city’s water crisis between 2015 and 2018, lessons appear to have been learnt from the challenge. Hill-Lewis reckons these include the need for Pretoria to devolve decision-making power on rail services; and find ways to address the working conditions under which taxi drivers operate - an arrangement which incentivises them to break the law. In this interview, the 36-year-old mayor also provides an update on the city’s progress towards fulfilling his campaign promise of ending loadshedding. He celebrates the role of an innovative power supply agreement to secure for Cape Town the first AWS Skills Centre outside of the USA, launched today. It brings Amazon’s seven-year investment commitment of a further R40bn on top of the R16bn already injected by the multinational. - Alec Hogg
Video production by Asime Nyide
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Timestamps
00:05 - Introductions
01:29 - Geordin Hill-Lewis on the recent taxi strike and whether it’s all over
04:08 - The risk involved
05:06 - On how they got the messaging consistent during the strikes
06:13 - How are the negotiations going
09:42 - On the water crisis and recent developments
12:19 - On the letter written to the president about devolution of rail power
13:22 - On the progress towards ending loadshedding
15:17 - Will Eskom have big challenges in the 3 to 5 year view
18:28 - On Amazon Web services is having its first non-U.S. point of presence in Cape Town
21:36 - Conclusions