Ghost riders: the invisible lives of Johannesburg food couriers

Ghost riders: the invisible lives of Johannesburg food couriers
theguardian.com

Is there no limit to how low SV bros will sink?

I actually favour use of the locally developed Mr D app as opposed to UberEats so as to keep profits from leaving the country. I don't know what cut UberEats takes from each transaction, but if it's anything like regular Uber, which based on my discussions with Uber drivers (when I'm a rider) is something well above 20% which I felt was shockingly high.

In regards to the drivers, crime and dangerous road conditions are probably the most concerning elements for them and is largely due to a combination of apathy, incompetence and corruption within the police (an all too common problem with our government run organisations).

Every year I see an increase in the amount of lawlessness by other drivers on the roads. This is because traffic police (at least in Johannesburg) seem to only care about reaching job mandated quotas (for things like fines issued, which are rarely collected) and soliciting bribes. It's worse though, their typical strategy to achieve these is to set up road blocks, which not only have no meaningful impact on improving road safety, but they also result in wasting the time of many motorists. A trip which should have taken 10 minutes lands up getting delayed by 15 making you late for where you were going.

Talking about lawlessness, it's worth mentioning that I have somewhat often seen these courier drivers themselves be lawless by doing things jumping traffic lights.

SAPS (South African Police Service, the "general" police) don't deal with traffic, but are the ones meant to follow up on general crime such as thefts. They're also somewhat apathetic, but I have heard many times that when it comes to crimes reported by African immigrants they'll almost always do nothing, xenophobia is a real problem here.

I have a couple of interesting stories from Uber drivers, most of which were from neighbouring African countries.

The one driver had a South African neighbour which he saw would just sit around all day doing mostly nothing, so he told the neighbour how he managed to became an Uber driver and convinced the neighbour to do the same. After about a week, he noticed the neighbour sitting around all day again and when he asked the story, the neighbour said he found it to be "too much work".

So when it comes to low-skilled jobs, in my experience immigrants are less likely to be apathetic towards their work. This results in the indigenous people feeling that foreigners are stealing their jobs, when the truth is that they're losing their jobs to people who actually make a proper effort. This occasionally leads to xenophobic driven violence.

The other story from an Uber driver has a fun ending. He was explaining that he occasionally will do non0Uber work for cash, while this results in him netting all the money, it also comes with a risk of non-payment. So when a rider asked him if he would be willing to do a non-Uber lift on the weekend, the driver checked on his WhatsApp group if other drivers knew the rider. A few of them had the same story of that rider skipping paying them. So the driver arranged with the rider to do the off-app trip, but just told the other drivers where the pick-up location was.

The driver was later messaged by the rider saying something like "I had no idea you guys talked amongst yourselves, I had to pay a lot of money this morning!".