South Africa’s efforts to restore its logistics infrastructure have seen it stabilise the system, but not yet execute a big leap forward.

This was the consensus among members of a panel speaking on the topic at the SAPICS 2025 conference held in Cape Town last week.

SAPICS is the South African Professional Body for Supply Chain Management.

Moderator Dr Juanita Maree – South African Association of Freight Forwarders CEO – asked the panellists to rank the key pillars of the Freight Logistics Roadmap as either green, amber or red.

The four pillars are policy and institutional reform; infrastructure investment; operational efficiency; and private sector participation.

Freight Logistics Roadmap key author and Operation Vulindlela rail and logistics adviser Jaap van der Merwe said he preferred to err on the side of caution when it came to pillar 1.

“This is not a kumbaya moment yet; we need to face the realities.”

Van der Merwe placed the progress within pillar 1 at 40%.

“We have set the policies, but we have not done the work to do the reform.

“We are at amber – if we are lucky.”

Operation Vulindlela is a joint initiative of the Presidency and National Treasury to accelerate the implementation of structural reforms and to support economic recovery.

As for infrastructure investment, Van der Merwe was even less optimistic, judging this pillar to be at red.

“We have simply not put in the money, and, even if we put in the money now, we are two, three, four years late and the reliability curves are showing us that, so let’s be very real.”

Van der Merwe said Pillar 3, operational efficiency, was at amber, as the freight system decline had been arrested from a volume point of view.

“We pulled it back. We are not there yet; there is a lot of fat in the system, but it is hard to take out.”

Van der Merwe believed that private sector participation was still at red, as this pillar was “really still in its baby shoes”.

Presidency project management office director Khule Duma was more upbeat as he rated pillar 1 as green – “we are quite positive” and “we have seen a lot of progress”.

However, he added his voice to that of Van der Merwe in rating pillar 2 as red, and a “big problem”.

Pillar 3 was at amber, owing to the “vast improvements” made, while pillar 4 was also at amber, "almost green", with 2025 the year to see progress in this area.

Duma noted that some critics held the view that the current pace of progress to restore and grow the freight system was not fast enough, however, he emphasised that the sheer number of changes happening meant that this was “no small reform whatsoever”.

“What effectively we are seeing from a policy perspective is perhaps the biggest change we have seen in the hundred years since the freight logistics system was established in South Africa.

“We are moving, and we are moving at a very fast pace.

“More and more we have an understanding of what stakeholders want, and I do think we are moving in the right direction.”

The private sector’s participant, A.P. Moller – Maersk Southern Africa and Indian Ocean Islands area sales head Theo Pappas, rated pillar 1 as amber, leaning towards green; pillar 2 as red; pillar 3 as amber; and private sector participation as green.

He confirmed that there had been stabilisation within South Africa’s port system, which had been in intensive care around 24 months ago.

He said this stabilisation had brought about predictability, which his shipping company and its customers “could work with”, as it allowed for forward planning.

However, the weak point now was the rail system.

“The hard work now is on the land side to get rail working; to do quicker handovers and move cargo quicker,” said Pappas.

Shosholoza Ports Operations CEO Innocentia Motau echoed this sentiment, noting that South Africa’s port operations had indeed been stabilised to a large degree, but that rail was now the “big elephant in the room”.