The Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) is at an advanced stage of reconstructing and modernizing infrastructure and remedying the maladministration and corruption in the state-owned enterprise, said Minister of Transport Fikile Mbalula Wednesday.
“We are conducting the oversight on the reconstruction and recovery work intended to rehabilitate our infrastructure from perway, overhead traction electricity, substations, signaling and train stations in these corridors.
We will then build on this to implement our modernization program and deploy the new trains across all our corridors,” said Mbalula when he addressed the media in Gauteng Province while showing journalists what the government has done to rebuild the infrastructure.
Of the 40 rail corridors in the country, 17 corridors are operational. In an effort to rehabilitate the corridors that were destroyed due to vandalism and theft of rail infrastructure, PRASA commenced upgrading the rail infrastructure and stations in April 2021.
Mbalula said the government has put in place a board in the company and could introduce a chief executive officer in place soon, adding that 3,100 security guards are employed to safeguard the infrastructure after mass infrastructure was stolen.
Chairperson of the PRASA board Leonard Ramatlakane said security guards are in place 24 hours a day and seven days a week, and the company has also instituted consequence management with 44 employees implicated in the irregular tenders undergoing disciplinary hearings. He said the company is investigating 28 billion rands (about 1.64 billion U.S. dollars) irregular expenditure identified by the authorities, adding that it is recovering the money paid by PRASA in Spain for the locomotives.
The reconstruction is over 90 percent completed in many areas and the trains which were suspended in 2019 are expected to start operating in September and October this year, said PRASA’s acting CEO David Mphelo. Enditem
