The Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) says although it remains focused on improving the rail system throughout the country, it cannot do so without government intervening to stem rampant criminality.
Workers belonging to the Federation of Unions of South Africa (Fedusa) and the United National Transport Union (UNTU) are expected to embark on marches in Durban, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Pretoria on Friday morning.
The workers, who will hand over a memorandum of grievances to provincial government offices, are demanding improved rail services including the safety of commuters on trains.
The unions are also calling on President Cyril Ramaphosa to urgently intervene in the matter.
Prasa Spokesperson Nana Zenani says the workers’ demands are legitimate.
Zenani says, “We do agree on a lot of the issues that they raised for instance this morning (Friday). We have had cable theft between Pretoria and Hercules. Therefore, there needs to be a different kind of intervention. We’ve updated our security contracts and in fact we getting new security teams to come on board in August.”
“In Cape Town specifically, we had security interventions coming where we had about 60 additional security teams, those particular security teams were attacked by machine-gun wielding gangs, so it’s getting to a point where our mandate has ended as Prasa in terms of what we can do, but again the focus for Prasa is the modernisation of the system but we cannot do that when there is rampant criminality on our system,” she adds.
