Driving the Next Infrastructure Economy

Juanita Maree (PhD), CEO of the Southern African Association of Freight Forwarders, explores how shaping logistics can strengthen trade and South Africa’s global position.

South Africa’s logistics debate has been dominated by deterioration: declining rail volumes, constrained ports, disrupted supply chains and the rising cost of moving goods. These failures have imposed a material penalty on economic growth and demanded urgent intervention.

However, a strategy concerned only with restoring what has been lost will not be sufficient for the economy South Africa must now build. The more consequential question is how we use the present reform moment to create a fundamentally more intelligent, integrated and investment-ready trade system.

Recovery seeks to restore capacity. Transformation asks whether that capacity is configured for a changing economy. Recovery repairs individual assets. Transformation connects infrastructure, information, regulation, technology and institutional capability around the movement of trade. Recovery addresses the immediate constraint. Transformation builds the foresight and resilience to prevent the next one.

South Africa now has the opportunity to make that transition.

Logistics is the operating system of the productive economy. It connects mines, farms and factories to markets, determines whether investment can be converted into output and directly influences the competitiveness of every business dependent on the movement of goods, securing South Africa’s position in African and global trade.

From an Infrastructure Programme to a Trade Strategy

The opening of rail networks, the introduction of private-sector participation in ports, the modernisation of border posts and the greater use of digital trade systems represent important progress. These reforms can unlock capital, operating capability and innovation at a scale that the public sector cannot provide alone.

Their combined value, however, will depend on whether they form part of a coherent national trade strategy.

This requires a shift from an asset-centred approach to a corridor and network perspective.

South Africa does not compete internationally through a port, railway, border post or road in isolation. It competes through the complete trade journey. Infrastructure planning must therefore connect production centres, logistics hubs, ports, border crossings and regional markets as a single system. A modern trade corridor must combine infrastructure with trusted information, interoperable technology, regulatory alignment, responsive institutions and predictable commercial access.

Data Must Become Productive Capital

For too long, logistics data has been treated principally as a reporting instrument: something used to describe performance after an event has occurred. Its greater value lies in shaping decisions before constraints become crises.

Reliable and appropriately shared data can identify pressure across corridors, guide infrastructure investment, improve capacity allocation, support predictive planning and allow both government and industry to test whether reform is producing the intended economic return – on the fly, so to speak. Data must therefore be recognised as productive capital within the logistics system.

South Africa requires more sophisticated capability for converting operational information into strategic foresight. That means moving beyond fragmented institutional datasets towards a common understanding of how cargo, capacity, cost and time interact across the trade network.

This calls for a more integrated measurement framework that connects infrastructure performance to end-to-end transit time, reliability, total landed cost, corridor capacity and ultimately the value of trade enabled by the system.

It also requires analytical independence. Data must be interrogated scientifically, compared over time and tested against conditions experienced by the users of the logistics network. Evidence should provide a common basis from which government and industry can confront difficult realities and design better solutions.

This is an area where the Southern African Association of Freight Forwarders (SAAFF) has developed an advanced institutional capability. SAAFF’s research and analytics division reflects a strategic decision that credible industry leadership must be grounded in evidence. Its work connects quantitative analysis with the direct operational intelligence generated across the freight forwarding, customs and logistics sectors.

The SAAFF BUSA Cargo Movement Report is one expression of this maturity. Its significance lies in the continuity, integrity and breadth of the intelligence it brings together. It provides a longitudinal view of cargo movement and allows emerging risks to be assessed within their wider economic and international context.

That capability informs policy engagement, tests assumptions, supports intervention design and enables results to be measured against credible baselines. Research, in this context, is not a supporting function. It is part of the machinery through which better logistics decisions are made.

Industry Representation as Economic Agency

A mature industry representative body’s real value lies in its agency: the capacity to anticipate change, aggregate intelligence, convene specialist expertise and translate the collective experience of an industry into viable economic solutions.

This is particularly important in a system as interconnected as logistics. Government, infrastructure operators and individual businesses each hold only part of the picture. Freight forwarders occupy the intersection between cargo owners, transport modes, terminals, borders, regulators and international markets. Collectively, they provide an unusually broad view of how trade policy and infrastructure perform in practice.

SAAFF’s distinctive capability lies in consolidating this widely dispersed expertise and operational knowledge, testing it against data and research, and translating it into authoritative industry intelligence – intelligence that can inform decisions, shape reform, advance practical solutions and distil early warnings in risk mitigation – on factors that impact fluidity in the logistics network.

Its working groups, priority projects, national coverage service structures enshrined in the working groups, escalation mechanisms and the National Trade Facilitation Programme provide the architecture. They allow operational experience to be examined against research, specialist knowledge and regulatory requirements before being advanced as an industry position towards reform.

Representation provides the mandate, legitimacy and collective voice of the industry. Strategic agency builds on that foundation, equipping the representative body with the intelligence, institutional capability and influence required to convert that voice into solutions and measurable outcomes.

It also changes the relationship between industry and the state. The most productive form of public-private collaboration is when evidence, capability and responsibility are brought together early enough to improve the design of policy, infrastructure and implementation.

Consultation then becomes a source of innovation and a mechanism for reducing execution risk.

Innovation Must Extend Beyond Technology

The logistics sector’s next advance will undoubtedly be digital. Artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, automation, smart-border systems and integrated data platforms will reshape how cargo is planned, cleared and moved.

However, technology is only one form of innovation. South Africa also needs institutional innovation: new models of collaboration, more responsive regulatory processes, flexible infrastructure partnerships, shared performance frameworks and faster mechanisms for converting evidence into decisions.

A sophisticated digital platform operating within a fragmented institutional environment will have limited effect. Genuine transformation occurs when technology, policy, infrastructure and human capability are redesigned as parts of the same system.

New systems should be developed with their users, tested against actual trade flows and assessed for unintended consequences across the complete supply chain. Innovation should make legitimate trade easier, compliance more effective and participation more inclusive, particularly for smaller businesses that cannot absorb additional layers of complexity or cost.

Designing the Logistics System We Need

South Africa’s logistics constraints have also forced a long-overdue reconsideration of how the system is structured, governed and measured.

The country should resist the temptation to define success as a return to former performer levels. The real opportunity is to build a logistics system capable of supporting future industrial growth, African trade integration and a rapidly changing global economy.

That will require investment and insight. It will require new infrastructure and greater institutional capacity. It will require technology and the disciplined use of evidence to determine where innovation can create the greatest economic value.

SAAFF has positioned itself for this environment as both the representative voice of freight forwarding and a research-led solutions-driven partner in the shaping of South Africa’s trade future.

Our role is to bring industry intelligence, convert data into foresight, turn collective expertise into practical interventions and ensure reform is ultimately measured by its effect on trade, competitiveness and economic growth.

The future will not be secured by managing logistics as a series of separate operational problems. It will be secured by designing it as an integrated national capability.

That is how we shape logistics. That is how we power trade and how infrastructure and innovation become engines of growth.

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Originally published in Business Day MOVE, October 2026, pages 28–29, in partnership with the Southern African Association of Freight Forwarders (SAAFF).

Read the original publication: MOVE October 2026 – Issuu