business
I
t has been nearly a quarter of a century
since the Department of Transport
in South Africa introduced the
National Traffic Information System
(Natis) in 1993 as the official register for all
vehicle, driving licence, contravention and
accident data. Ten years ago, in April 2007
an electronic version of the system – eNatis
– was officially launched. This year will
see another milestone relating to vehicle
registration come to pass, although this time
it is not for vehicles that travel on our roads.
In South Africa, at least 50 000 moveable
assets worth around R40-billion are financed
over a calendar year, most without records.
While this includes all assets — from
generators to pleasure craft — the majority
is equipment used on mines, quarries and
construction sites. The Southern Africa
Movable Asset Register (SAMAR) was
designed to address this problem.
Following the introduction of the National
Road Traffic Act, 1996 (Act No. 93 of 1996),
however, vehicles that are not designed
for public road use and cannot legally be
roadworthied, may no longer be registered
on eNatis. Since banks used the title on eNatis
registration documents as confirmation of
their interest in the financed assets, removing
certain asset classes created a problem, as it
effectively withdrew the application of the
title administered through the system. There
is also the fact that many equipment owners
who purchased their vehicles prior to the
change in legislation are unaware that their
asset is no longer legally registered on eNatis.
According to Kyle Dutton, project manager
for SAMAR, investigations into several
instances of disputed asset ownership
resulted in a decision reinforcing the fact that
any vehicle that could not be roadworthy
could not be legally registered on eNatis.
“This is largely a safety issue, as many of
these vehicles do not have indicators or brake
lights, for example,” he explains, “but a lot
of yellow metal equipment — bulldozers,
excavators and mining equipmen t — that
doesn’t fit the roadworthy specs but had
previously been allowed on eNatis was no
longer permitted to be registered on the
system. This meant that the banks no longer
had a registry of these assets.”
In 2010, the banks approached the founders
of SAMAR to determine the feasibility of
replicating the eNatis system for non-
roadworthy moveable assets. Despite quite
a lot of work being done on the project,
including the start of vehicle registration, the
banks withdrew from the idea a year later and
the project was shelved until 2014 when they
decided to go ahead.
According to Dutton, one of the major
problems facing the banks was double
dipping in financing. A person would apply
for a commercial loan from one bank and
a personal loan from another, for example,
to finance the same 40 forklifts. Borrowers
would receive twice the money required and
then disappear with the extra, leaving the
banks to fight in court over who actually
owned the assets. The lack of any formal
registry also resulted in banks literally
engraving their names or marks on the assets
that they had financed, for example, to try
and keep track of them — even this was not
always sufficient.
SAMAR aims to address these issues by
providing an easily accessible registry of
moveable assets that lists title holder and
owner for each asset. Each registered asset
will be issued with a unique number and
marked. “We’ve devised a label that can
be applied to any asset. It’s completely UV
resistant and temperature resistant to 200°C.
If you try pull it off it will leave the barcode
behind,” says Dutton. Although many assets
are already registered on SAMAR, many of
them were added before the label was created
and are labelled retroactively.
How it works
After receiving the go-ahead from the banks,
SAMAR approached the manufacturers,
importers and builders (MIBs) to explain the
concept of the register and ask whether they
could load their equipment onto the register
at source when it is manufactured or enters
the country. Since the purpose of SAMAR
is to provide a history of the lifecycle of an
asset, registering it as early in the lifecycle
as possible would obviously provide more
complete data.
At the time of this interview, Babcock was
the only OEM involved with SAMAR on a large
QUARRY SA | MAY 2017 _ 13