The Bazaar Pretoria Local and Long-Distance Taxi Association has come up with a novel initiative to help its passengers during their time of bereavement.
According to the association’s vice chairperson Robert Mathebula, the initiative was started last year after realising that some of their commuters encounter financial problems when death has struck their families.
“What happens is that the bereaved commuter or passenger must report the death in his or her family as early as possible so that the association must be able to make the necessary arrangements in assisting the bereaved family,” he said.
The assistance from the association comes in the form of vegetables and taxi vehicles to ferry mourners to the cemetery for the burial of the deceased.
“The costs of buying vegetables is high and so is the cost of hiring a bus for the mourners, so we thought it would be a good thing for us as an association to help our customers with vegetables and transport so as to relieve them from the stress caused by burial costs,” said Mathebula.
But Mathebula indicated that taxi vehicles can only be made available to the bereaved family if the burial takes place on a Sunday because on Saturdays and during the week the vehicles are very busy and it becomes difficult to take them off the road and send them to a funeral.
“This initiative is aimed at helping our loyal passengers and we have even issued commuter or passenger cards for our loyal supporters, and this helps us to see as to how many loyal passengers we have and which they are,” he said.
“The cards also help our loyal passengers to benefit from several other initiatives like discounts for their trips when using our taxis,” said Mathebula.
“The initiative to issue cards to loyal passengers was introduced in 2022,” he said.
He said more initiatives and programmes will follow the present initiatives as many passengers who had stopped using their taxi vehicles had now returned in large numbers.
He urged passengers to approach the association’s offices with any problem that they may encounter when using the association’s taxi vehicles, including reporting unruly taxi drivers who don’t treat them well and use foul language against them as passengers.
The association’s offices are at the BP petrol-filling station and their numbers are also visible on the T-shirts of the association.
Bazaar Taxi Association chairperson Abram Ngwenya confirmed that indeed the association helps bereaved families with transport and vegetables and also urged passengers to approach him when they need any clarity regarding matters that are associated with his association as he was ready to assist them.
The taxi association was formed in 1987, and its headquarters are at the Marabastad taxi rank.
Its taxi vehicles transport commuters to places like Soshanguve and Brits and also to far flung areas like Limpopo and Wonderkop in Marikana.