ANA reports that Transport Minister Blade Nzimande has instructed the board of the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) to improve the reliability of trains by 60% and improve train cancellations by 41%.  

This was indicated following a meeting Nzimande held with Prasa, prompted by President Cyril Ramaphosa’s first-hand experience of the difficulties regularly experienced by commuters when using Metrorail trains.  When the president boarded a train from Mabopane to the Tshwane CBD recently, the train was delayed by two hours.  Nzimande said the board had been tasked with the responsibility to secure trains, passengers and assets by deploying security personnel on trains, and also to erect fencing or walling in depots in all regions.  He said the board furthermore had to address the lack of consequence management, following the Mountainview crash near Pretoria in January which claimed four lives and left 620 injured.  “I have also escalated the vandalisation and torching of trains to the security cluster of Cabinet so that government deal decisively with this criminality,” Nzimande advised.  He said he would be working to change laws so that torching of trains would be declared a serious crime of arson.

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