Logistics & Transport

In HRV terms, transport and logistics is binding in South Africa because the social return to almost any other investment — in mining, manufacturing, agriculture, tourism — is being appropriated by a collapsing state freight and port system before it reaches the producer. Rail volumes moved by Transnet Freight Rail fell from roughly 226 million tonnes in 2017/18 to about 152 million tonnes in 2023/24, while Durban and Ngqura sit near the bottom of the World Bank's Container Port Performance Index. The National Treasury's own 2023 estimate put the cost of logistics dysfunction at around 5% of GDP annually. This is not a case of high but surmountable transaction costs; it is a case where the shadow price of moving a tonne of coal, citrus, or a container has risen sharply, exporters are self-rationing, and the marginal project in the tradable sector cannot clear the logistics hurdle regardless of its own fundamentals.

The database treats the constraint as fundamentally an issue of vertical separation and contestability rather than capex alone. Freight Rail Third-Party Access and Transnet Separation and the enabling National Rail Policy White Paper: Third-Party Access Framework together establish the legal architecture for competing train operators on Transnet's network, while Transnet Freight Rail and Port Private Sector Participation brings concessionaire capital and operating discipline into terminals and corridors, and Transport Economic Regulator: Operationalising the EROT Act supplies the independent umpire without which open access collapses into disputes over track access charges. The common thread is sequencing: the structural reforms (separation, regulator, access regime) are formally in place or close to it, but the operational wins — Port Productivity Improvement Programme, PRASA recovery, IPTN scale-up — lag, and quick-wins for households such as a Learner Transport Policy: Funded National Programme sit at the proposed stage.

Watch three things over the next year: the number of private train operating companies actually running paths on the Transnet network and the tonnage they move; crane moves per hour at Durban Pier 2 and Ngqura; and whether the Transport Economic Regulator is appointed, funded, and issuing its first access-charge determinations rather than remaining a paper entity.