While claiming to be on the mend, the operational performance of the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) has continued to deteriorate, with only a quarter of its performance targets met in the recent past financial year. While the Prasa management may argue that the 26% performance achievement was an improvement from the previous year’s 21% success rate, passengers continue to vanish as trains become even scarcer.
In the year ended March 2019, Prasa carried 208 million paying passenger trips, down from 262 million the previous year. The Western Cape suffered the most, with a 37% decline in paying passengers, the annual report shows.
Prasa’s Metrorail unit is the single largest mover of people, with more than 2.5 million commuters, mostly working-class low-paid workers, relying on it daily to get them to their places of work and home.
The rail agency has not had a properly appointed board of directors since May 2017.
The term of the current interim board expired in October 2019, and the minister of transport, Fikile Mbalula, has not yet appointed a replacement board. He could not tell Daily Maverick what the delay is, other than vaguely saying Cabinet processes were to blame for the delay to his self-imposed deadline – Mbalula said earlier in November that he’d appoint a new board before the end of the year.
The utility also has not had a properly appointed chief executive since 2015. Since then Prasa has employed and lost six acting chief executives. The current interim chief executive, Nkosinathi Sishi, is the seventh person to occupy that position since 2015.
The instability intensified at the executive management level during the past two years, with the executive committee operating at a third of its strength for most of the period as executives were either suspended, placed on special leave, or fired after disciplinary hearings for the corruption that gutted the utility over the past 10 years.
Under the leadership of Sishi, together with that of the board by chairman Khanyisile Kweyama, the performance of Prasa has plunged, threatening the very survival of the organisation as it failed to maintain critical infrastructure.
www.dailymaverick.co.za
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