A Metrorail carriage burns after an arson attack on Cape Town station in 2017. Archive photo: Ashraf Hendricks
21 March 2019
President Cyril Ramaphosa got a taste of what South African commuters regularly experience on Monday. South Africans watched video clips showing him stuck on a Pretoria Metrorail train for several hours. “We are going to take steps to fix the situation,” promised the president in a video shot by ENCA.
The breakdown of commuter train services across the country is a direct consequence of the massive looting of the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) by past CEOs and boards, especially Lucky Montana. It epitomised state capture.
The media has reported this grand-scale theft extensively, as well as the daily difficulties that commuters experience (see, for example, our coverage of the #PRASALeaks). Activist groups like #UniteBehind, the Rail Commuters Action Group and Public Transport Voice have for years been drawing attention to the collapse of Metrorail.
It is good that PRASA is now on the president’s agenda. But fixing PRASA will not be easy. Morale is low and many corrupt officials remain in or close to the parastatal, still looking for opportunities to suck it dry. Numerous carriages have been burnt. There have been six interim or acting CEOs in the last three years, including the current one. Here is what commuter activists say the president and his cabinet need to do to fix the trains:
There will also need to be further prosecutions of the people who destroyed PRASA.