North West Transport Investment responds to employees on 10 months nonpayment of provident funds

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Photo: Page3 Reporter

Following a two day tools down protest by North West Star bus staff members, the mother body, North West Transport Investment (NTI) (SOC) was forced to engage in a meeting with the employees in an over 2 hours meeting at Batswana Gare bus depot in Soshanguve.

Staff members were complaining that the company has been making monthly provident fund deductions but haven’t been making payments to Old Mutual for the past ten months.

An act which was confirmed by the company through a media statement saying they have been experiencing dire financial strains since 2016 because of among other reasons, aging fleet and high operational costs which affected most of their operations.

“By then [2016] the company could only afford salaries and wages. The situation resulted in the provisional liquidation of the company. The North West Provincial Government, which is a shareholder of NTI, then settled the debt backlog but the situation did not improve because of lockdown and the resultant limited sitting capacity as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic” said NTI Spokesperson Mr Freddy Sepeng.

He also said that upon discharge of provisional liquidation they developed measures to things around by acquiring more buses and selling non-core assets among other things. But the these measures were only put in place in November 2020.

“The company [NTI] is expecting to increase its revenue by 30% as from February this year after off-peak period of December and January. With improved revenue the company should be able to address historical debt, including 3rd party payments” said Sepeng.

Satawu’s NTI Chairperson Nelson Madumo said that although they are happy with the resolution they have reached between them, employees and the employer, they are still not happy with how the company is being run because they always have problems and as soon as one is fixed the other one arises.

He said that their agreement was that they will no longer be continuing with monthly deductions from their salaries to be paid to Old Mutual starting from this month, January.

The 10 months worth money owed by the company to them will no longer go to Old Mutual but to them as employees directly as soon as the company finds the money.

Madumo concluded by saying that it is sad to see a company, NTI, so big being marred by allegations of misconduct and mismanagement every now and then with no prospects of everlasting solution.

“Maybe it is about time government starts to take problems faced by this company seriously and get rid of incompetent people at the management. It doesn’t matter how many administrators you appoint you won’t solve the problem if you don’t change the management.”