A colleague once pitched a story he never got around to writing because of Covid and the hard lockdown.
It was about a blue-collar worker who had to quit his job because it was becoming too expensive to travel to and from his place of employment.
For many years, the man had relied on the commuter rail system to ferry him between his job in Johannesburg and his home on the far East Rand.
This was at a fraction of the price he would have had to pay were he to use a minibus taxi or any of the other privately owned transport operations.
By 2019, according to my colleague, the man was already having trouble getting to work on time as the train schedule had become unreliable due to breakdowns mostly caused by acts of vandalism.
Sometimes he would get home long after his family had gone to bed as the train would have been stuck somewhere between the City of Gold and his township.
This was at the time when the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) was trying to recover from many years of state capture that had resulted in infrastructure not being well looked after.
Who can forget the red faces in March 2019, just two months before the general election, when President Cyril Ramaphosa found himself stuck on a Metrorail train for more than three hours?
The president was on the campaign trail and he and his comrades had taken a train from Mabopane township to Pretoria in what was intended to show him as a “man of the people” and demonstrate that Prasa — one of the parastatals hardest hit by state capture — was on its way to recovery.
Instead, the trip gave Ramaphosa a first hand experience of the kind of frustration many commuters had to go through each morning. It would have given him a good understanding of what sometimes caused passengers to torch trains.
But things were not about to get better despite all the promises from the president that heads were going to roll if the relevant authorities didn’t fix the problem.
As the country was forced to shut down in early 2020 due to the global outbreak of the coronavirus, criminal gangs and other vandals saw this as a great opportunity to break and steal key infrastructure — hence rendering many routes across the country dysfunctional.
As a result, when the country reopened, hundreds of thousands of citizens, including the man my colleague told us about, suddenly found themselves having to look for alternative forms of transport that often cost three or more times the cost of a train ticket.
This at a time when many were still recovering from months of having no income at all or of having their salaries slashed due to the lockdown. Very few were to receive inflation-related increases in the months and years to come.
Yet they had to fork out more, just to get to work and back.
By the time the country fully reopened, my colleague had lost contact with the man he had wanted to write about. Having quit his job because he could no longer afford it, the man probably had to leave town and move to another area where he could make a living.
Since then there have been commendable efforts to fix the passenger rail system. If reports from Prasa and the ministry of transport are anything to go by, most of the corridors have now been restored and the country’s rail system will soon be operating to full capacity.
Much of this is due to the turnaround work carried out by the current Prasa management. They seem to be getting it right.
He and his team should be given space to do their jobs so that, in future, no worker is forced to quit work just because they simply can’t afford to commute
Yet in recent weeks Prasa has continued to be in the news for all the wrong reasons, mainly due to legacy issues that were not duly resolved.
One such matter related to Prasa’s now former CEO Zolani Matthews. His matter threatened to plunge the parastatal back into crisis mode when the labour court ruled in his favour in a case in which he was challenging his dismissal.
The July 1 court ruling meant that Prasa now had two CEOs since the company, in the course of its dispute with Matthews, appointed Hishaam Emeran in his place.
But after weeks of negotiations between the parties, it would seem that the matter has reached finality with Prasa reportedly terminating Matthews’s contract and paying him out all the remuneration it owes him.
Hopefully this is where the matter ends as Prasa can ill afford continued leadership instability.
Emeran is something of a dark horse but judging by the past year or so, he seems to be steadying the ship. He and his team should be given space to do their jobs so that, in future, no worker is forced to quit work just because they simply can’t afford to commute. Such should not be happening, especially in a country where so many millions are unemployed.
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