LETTER: What do Transnet Freight Rail’s 34,000 employees actually do?

Reading Ayanda Shezi’s spin in Business Day, you can see why Transnet is in the mess it is in (“Transnet makes headway in bringing private sector players on board,” December 4). One contract out of 16 awarded, and this is considered a success?

Driving between Cape Town and Potchefstroom, I saw only two trains on the 1,300km of excellent condition railway lines. On the N1, I saw 600 trucks. Why are no trains running? There is no incentive to run them. Salaries get paid every month, jobs for all are protected.

Now it seems Transnet will rent out the lines on terms that are essentially uneconomic, so others can do the work and they can sit in their ivory towers and count the money.

Transnet Freight Rail employs 34,000 people. What do they all do? Not much is the answer, as they’re manning fixed infrastructure whether utilised or not, and trains that are idle or broken still have drivers sitting at home. The perfect government job.   

To build this railway infrastructure would require many hundreds of billions of rand, yet it sits idle as a stark monument to the failure of state ownership in railways.

In SA, the old guard of skilled railway men made way for unskilled employees, unmotivated and unmanaged, who ticked the right boxes. Now the last of those railway men has retired and it’s in free fall.

Siza Mzimela, the opinionated CEO of Transnet Freight Rail, with a chequered history in transport (none in railways), is a state-owned enterprise careerist cadre who is out of her depth.

She has failed to arrest the decline of freight rail because doing so would require hard business decisions, like the ones SAA did not make

Rob Tiffin
Cape Town

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