Back in May, I worked for a now-defunct Taxpayers’ Union organisation for two weeks. I wrote several articles for them which were never published. I feel they are still relevant today, and hope you find them interesting.
According to a long term study by the Brenthurst Foundation, our rail system has been declining in demand for almost 50 years relative to road transport, as the expansion of our road networks for private transport has led to a gradually accumulating advantage for road transport over rail. The use of roads over rail for the transport of goods, according to this report, is a trend that reached a tipping point already in 1977, and this trend continues. And yet the government does not apply itself to the problem, and fritters billions away on rail while neglecting our roads.
The number of roads in South Africa may indeed be large, at 750 000km, but only 21% of this is paved. The condition of our roads is notorious, and road safety is considered by experts to be the worst in the world. Professional reports on road conditions leave only the Western Cape and the private toll roads of Gauteng with an unambiguously positive rating, the rest of the country dragged down by an almost total absence of monitoring or maintenance.
Part of this is due to the fact that in 1977, the government removed restrictions of the weight of road vehicles, to reduce transport costs under sanctions. But the unintended consequence was that roads received increased wear and tear from extended use under heavier loads. It also meant that all this freight traffic was no longer travelling by rail, and the transport fees that could have contributed to rail maintenance have evaporated, increasing the burden on infrastructure all round.
There has been ample opportunity to change this, but opportunity is dodged like soap in a commune. While rail as a goods transit service may be inefficient, one area where our rail services are still essential is passenger transport. But even here, the desperate state of our government is evident. Passenger transport has been in decline since at least 2014, and the causes should surprise nobody. As the aforementioned Brenthurst Foundation report says:
“the national rail network is no longer on its knees: it is out for the count. Thanks to management instability, incompetence and astonishing neglect of simple governance (the entire PRASA board was fired by Minister Mbalula in December 2019), no rail security guards at all were in place for several months during the lockdown in 2020. The thieves moved in. In mid-September last year, more than 6km of cable was stolen in just 24 hours.”
Just over a month ago, Minister of Transport Fikile Mbalula announced that during the lockdown period, the rail services had accrued R1.9 billion in damages due to vandalism alone, and that 80% of our passenger rail cars had been vandalised. Typically for an ANC department, they blamed their subordinates at PRASA for the damages, without addressing the systemic incompetencies demonstrated by all the interlocking departments required to maintain the infrastructure.
The failures are share by the department of transport and the police alike. The railway police force, a separate and well-trained branch of state security, were transferred to the notoriously corrupt and incompetent SAPS in 2007, making them dependent on the schedules, budget, equipment and staff demands of the police service, and saw most of their remaining senior staff let go, ridding them of any experienced members to uphold standards.
More recently, the lockdown policies, which have demonstrated themselves largely ineffective at containing the spread of the novel coronavirus, have led to a destruction of the economy, creating desperation and a surge in metal scrap theft. This has affected power stations, where transformers, conduit cables and batteries has led to an acceleration of load shedding nationwide. But its effect of rail is crippling, as the overhead cables required to power electric rail are stolen. Incompetence, financial mismanagement and corruption mean that acquiring replacement parts is often a long enough process that whole stations disappear into rust while waiting for their lines to reopen.
Due to the perennial threat of vandalism, rail cars are often destroyed. They are also seldom replaced or repaired, leaving just 33 of the Western Cape’s 88 rail cars operational. Train stations are destroyed by theft and vandalism, and power outages mean that warning lights at rail junctions are out of order, creating severe safety hazards. Squatters, protected by stringent national legislation, deliberately build shacks on top of WC rail networks after removing the rails, and refuse to be relocated.
All of this would appear to be in line with the governing party’s long-standing strategy, usually implemented through informal or illicit channels, to make territory it does not control ungovernable, the WC sees 71% of all rail arson attacks. This creates opportunities for tenders, while undermining the public perception of the performance of services in the province, where most people assume that the DA controls all government services, which are mostly still in the hands of the central government.
Ramaphosa has announced a R900 billion project to combat metal theft and vandalism on the rail networks, with some impressive claims regarding security personnel and the deployment of surveillance drones. He also has poured R100 billion into the port of Durban. But a change in the manner of doing business from the previous presidency cannot be expected.Under the Zuma-era NDP program, Transnet and Prasamoney was funnelled into many corrupt projects (as an MP put it, an “Armageddon of corruption”) under the guise of facilitating a transfer of services from road to rail. But despite criticism of the corrupt system of cronyism called cadre deployment, Ramaphosa insists that it is in principle a good way of doing business.
Given the track record of this administration’s disastrous neglect of our infrastructure during lockdown, the unprecedented levels of corruption seen under its watch, and the refusal to rid itself of the most pernicious corrupt practices, the likelihood that we will see an end to theft, degradation and wasteful expenditure is slim at best.