Attacks on commercial vessels navigating the Red Sea are forcing ships to travel around Africa to transport goods to European and North American markets.
However, major African ports on the continent’s east coast, including Mombasa, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, are too small to handle a large number of big ships in a short period of time.
That means most of the pressure is on South African ports, themselves wracked by multiple crises, including mismanagement, corruption, and lengthy electricity outages.
To reach the waterway, ships must travel the Red Sea. However, Houthi militants in Yemen that are allied with Iran are attacking vessels on the route, which prompted an international naval mission led by the United States to shoot down the missiles and drones launched by the terrorists.
Houthi forces say they’re targeting vessels with links to Israel in retaliation for the Jewish state’s war in Gaza.
International shipping companies are now diverting ships around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, a much longer journey, in a disruption that has sparked higher oil prices and strangled global supply chains.
Analysts are also predicting it will raise the cost of shipping significantly.
In March 2021, the Suez Canal was blocked for six days when a Taiwanese container ship ran aground. The incident increased the cost of shipping a container to $14,000 from $2,000.
“So far, 364 ships have rerouted,“ Noam Raydan, a shipping analyst at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told The Epoch Times.” They now need to make a 6,000-nautical-mile diversion around South Africa.
“If this crisis in the Red Sea continues much longer, consumers will definitely pay more for imported goods.
“A round-trip voyage from Shanghai to Europe, for example, will add at least $1 million in fuel. We’re seeing insurance premiums soaring in response to the attacks.
“This emergency is going to hit pockets around the world, and not in a good way.”
The “logical” ports for diverted ships to restock and refuel are Durban and Cape Town, Africa’s two most developed harbors, South Africa’s Road Freight Association director, Gavin Kelly, told The Epoch Times.
But those ports, and others in South Africa, are clogged, mainly because of the collapse of the country’s railways, he said.
“Exports have to get to the port somehow. And the only somehow—because we can’t send it by plane—is trucks. So now, we see queues of trucks trying to get into our ports, and the ports weren’t designed to take hundreds of trucks a day, offloading, turning around, and going out. They were built for rail,” he said.
“Now, you have massive congestion inside the port, and these long queues of trucks stacking up.”
Mr. Kelly said South Africa’s rail cargo system had been “destroyed” by decades of graft, inadequate development, and lack of maintenance.
“On top of that, thieves engaged in mass stealing of railway electricity cables during the lockdowns caused by the COVID pandemic and all the subsequent power failures,” he said.
“In many cases, criminals have stolen entire railway stations, leaving just bricks behind.”
Mr. Kelly said “tens of thousands” of containers are piled up as officials struggle to process them.
“Transnet [South Africa’s state-run transport authority] has failed to set up proper computer systems, and mismanagement and corruption have resulted in the degradation of facilities at ports. Long electricity outages [also because of corruption and mismanagement at state electricity corporation, Eskom] are making things worse,” he said.
“Because of this chaos, it’s going to be impossible for port workers to process and service extra ships in good time.
“I see the ships coming in from the Red Sea being delayed outside South African harbors for between 10 to 14 days, at least, and we’re already seeing scores of them in queues packed on the sea around our ports.”
Transnet Chairperson Andile Sangqu told The Epoch Times that years of budget cuts are to blame for the company not building enough capacity.
“Nothing’s going to happen overnight. We’ve indicated many times that we’d need to invest in improving our infrastructure. Our equipment has deteriorated. This is as a result of many years of underinvestment and many years of under-maintenance,” he said.
“Yes, there has been bad management in the past, and I am aware of the allegations of corruption. These are being investigated.”
“Africa has a coastline of more than 26,000 kilometers [almost 16,200 miles] containing more than 100 ports. They’re strategically positioned on major global trade routes but they overwhelmingly have poor infrastructure and their equipment is outdated,” Mr. Kelly said.
“This represents a loss of about 5 percent of gross domestic product, and the crisis is worsening,” Mr. Kelly said.
A Transnet official in Durban who spoke on condition of anonymity told The Epoch Times the port is currently capable of handling only six vessels at a time.
“The politicians and my bosses will tell you something different, but this is the truth,” he said.
“The reality is we are just not prepared at all for additional traffic, and least of all for all these large ships carrying a lot of cargo and all needing a lot of fuel and supplies.”
In response, Transnet Acting Group CEO Michelle Phillips told The Epoch Times that an “internal task team from specialized disciplines” is in the process of “introducing rapid improvements” toward boosting productivity at all South African ports.
“Management at our port terminals is working around the clock with industrial engineers from the task team to maximize berth performance,” Ms. Phillips said.
“It’s very important for us to stabilize our operations through short-term interventions while we continue with a broad recovery plan to improve Transnet operations. We won’t be able to handle the extra ships arriving from the Red Sea in the way that we would like, but I can give my assurance that we’ll do our best and we’ll keep delays as short as possible.”
Andrew Whitfield, a spokesperson for South Africa’s main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, said the government must allow private sector companies to help ease the crisis at harbors, as the state had failed to “do its duty.”
“We need to make sure that the things that the state cannot do are outsourced to the private sector, in partnership. You can’t attract private investment into the ports unless the private sector has a stake,” he told The Epoch Times.
“The Red Sea crisis has exposed just how pathetic our state-managed freight sector and ports have become.”
Ms. Raydan said even minimal delays in shipping will cause congestion at container ports across Europe.
“Container ships will be hit badly, but soon, we’ll see big problems in Europe because ships carrying oil, gas, and coal will be delayed, in the middle of the northern hemisphere winter.”
