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Faizel Patel – 29/07/2021
The CEO of the Road Freight Association Gavin Kelly says the impact of the cyber attack on Transnet is expected to create massive delays and unreliability of the movement of goods across all modes of transport.
Kelly was speaking to Radio Islam on Wednesday about the attack which began on 22 July but continued, forcing Transnet to switch to manual systems.
According to a “confidential” notice, the attack has affected ports in Durban including Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Ngqura.
Kelly says the cyber attack created a ripple effect on different sectors of the transport industry.
“The first and immediate ripple effect was that there are a lot of transporters who weren’t generating revenue. The medium term effect is of course that those delays we have in the port especially in the port of Durban due to the protests and unrests in KZN will now just extend. So we’re already about a week behind in terms of getting stuff out of the port.”
Kelly says it is unclear when operations are expected to return to normal after the cyber attack.
“It’s going to take us some time to get the backlog sorted out. It’s Durban at the moment that seems to have come back online, not all the other ports are back online yet. Hopefully with Durban we can start getting back to what we call peak efficiency and maybe ramp up a bit more. But we’re not going to catchup the backlog which has now been impacted by the protest backlog probably for at least a week.”
Kelly says there are some industries that may be considering using alternative ports and routes to transport goods following the recent deadly protests in KZN and Gauteng, adding that South Africa has become known as an “unreliable, unsafe destination or transit country.”
Listen to the interview with Gavin Kelly
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