The intro of the story we ran on the return of passenger rail services to Soweto yesterday said it all: we have been down this route before. Making the news once again was a promise by the powers that be, again, about resuming services that should never have been allowed to stop in the first place.
The occasion was the reopening of the key rail corridor from Pretoria central to Pienaarspoort (in Mamelodi), to the east of the city. The reopening of this corridor follows on the heels of the Pretoria-Mabopane route which was relaunched to similar fanfare earlier this year.
The promise to get the Soweto trains back on track was made earlier but this time the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) has put a date to the resumption of the service next month.
The reintroduction of these services follows the widespread vandalism that all but killed the passenger rail network throughout the country, more so in the big cities where millions of workers relied heavily on the comparatively cheap railways to travel to their workplaces and back home.
But to limit the restoration of the railroad to just the relaunching of routes and rebuilding infrastructure is akin to papering cracks on the walls. The passenger rail system had deteriorated badly long before Covid-19 came into the picture. In many instances the ticketing system was nonexistent and Prasa must have been running at a huge loss because of that.
Stations and routes were often stripped of power cables, leading to the destruction of signalling, putting lives at risk
The well-documented corruption at both Prasa and Transnet, as ventilated at the Zondo commission and other inquiries, had also helped to significantly weaken a pillar of the economy, especially in a developing country such as ours that can ill-afford to throw money at problems.
What is needed in the railways is a proper management of all aspects of the system, from security of passengers to the safeguarding of infrastructure.
The vandalism during the peak of the pandemic reached industrial levels yet no discernible measures such as prosecution of those involved has taken place, if only to send out an unequivocal message that such crimes will not be tolerated.
The question is, what is to stop the thugs that got away with the theft of the infrastructure doing it again?
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