A year ago, I predicted SA would react violently to Uber, with disaffected taxi operators and drivers resorting to threats and violence where other markets have reacted with lawsuits. Now, I'm hearing almost daily from Uber users who tell me of drivers being threatened, and even of angry taxi drivers threatening private vehicles when seeing the occupant using a phone, assuming he is an Uber operative and jumping to a violent conclusion.
This is why we can't have nice things: we are not a nice place to do business.
Sure, SA has challenges. We have infrastructural problems, we're somewhat behind in terms of connectivity, our economy isn't great... but to an investor, those are engineering problems to be solved. You factor them in, and if the equation is still positive, you invest.
But no one wants to invest in a country where competitors will react by setting their staff on fire. That doesn't fit neatly into any economist's equations.
Who needs whom?
The fact is: we need Uber more than Uber needs us. We don't need Uber because it's a better transport service (though it is). We don't need Uber because it blows open a controlled industry and thereby creates jobs, empowers new income tiers and creates small businesses (though it does). We especially don't need Uber with its frat-house management and spiteful competitive practices - let's not kid ourselves, this is not a bunch of saints.
We, as a society, need Uber because it changes the way we think. I and many of my friends will never willingly take another metered cab again, because we know that a vastly superior type of service is out there. Yes, some taxi syndicate bosses will be inconvenienced in the process, but they are numerically a tiny minority - the drivers actually stand to benefit along with their customers. All of the Uber drivers I've met are ex-metered cab drivers.
Does Uber need Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban? Sure, the company is expanding rapidly, but there are many, many other untapped markets ripe for Uber's arrival, and while it faces legislative challenges almost everywhere from entrenched operators resisting disruption, SA's uniquely toxic and violent community may eventually force it to move on to less unfriendly markets.
Uber the taxi company is big. Uber the platform could be massive.
At some point, Uber will pivot, probably around the time it IPOs. It's a clever ride-share facilitator, but it would be an astonishingly good service platform for... just about everything else. There have been inklings of this, even in SA, with the Santa's sleigh gift truck and the massages on demand - but these are drops in the ocean. Why can't every small business (and big business, for that matter) leverage Uber to facilitate delivery, reputation management, payment, and geolocation services? Uber the taxi company is big. Uber the platform could be massive.
When that happens, we won't just be losing out on a better transport service, we'll be losing out on a whole raft of modern services, and we'll fall behind. That will be most visible to our overseas audience: tourists and foreign business people. These are the people who, like Uber, will take their money elsewhere if we fail to live up to their expectations.
It's not about Uber
Just as Uber is not about taxi rides, but about disrupting consumer expectations, this story is not about Uber, but about market forces and SA's competitiveness.
Anyone who thinks this disruption is limited to one outlier like Uber is dangerously mistaken. All around the world economists grapple with a new generation of automation, and what it means for the workforce. Amazon operates robotic warehouses where human beings are only involved in the final mundane step of putting products into shipping containers - all the picking, stock control, and optimisation is robotic. Mines are increasingly automated. Trucking fleets have been the first to commercially embrace self-driving vehicles.
SA doesn't even have self-service petrol stations.
How do you think the labour unions would react to robotic warehouses? Self-service cashier stations in supermarkets? Self-driving trucks? Computer-controlled mining robots? Mass market 3D printing?
SA's economic reality is one of a large pool of irregularly employed manual labour, which we are desperate to protect through what amounts to make-work and conscious inefficiency. Unfortunately, that also means we are several generations behind in terms of service expectation, and at least two generations behind in terms of industrial and commercial automation.
What will change that? Maybe we just need more careful handling - if Uber had embarked on a propaganda campaign to convince taxi drivers they offered higher earning potential and solid entrepreneurship opportunities, those drivers might be waving their pangas at Cape Town officials and their own taxi bosses, rather than at the competition. If you can't beat them, and all that.
What are the alternatives? How are we going to change mindsets, embrace disruptive tools and services, and make SA a great place to do business in the emerging generation of global industry and commerce? Leave a comment if you have an idea, because we need ideas, badly.
Share