{"id":248229,"date":"2023-01-25T15:02:09","date_gmt":"2023-01-25T13:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/president-urged-to-sack-prasas-board-and-hand-over-passenger-rail\/"},"modified":"2023-01-25T15:02:09","modified_gmt":"2023-01-25T13:02:09","slug":"president-urged-to-sack-prasas-board-and-hand-over-passenger-rail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/president-urged-to-sack-prasas-board-and-hand-over-passenger-rail\/","title":{"rendered":"President urged to sack PRASA\u2019s board and hand over passenger rail"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article_body\">\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/photographers\/Ashraf%20Hendricks\/Train-1188HR.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"warn_big\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/president-urged-to-sack-prasas-board-and-hand-over-passenger-rail.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">Activist group #UniteBehind has urged President Cyril Ramaphosa to speed up the handover of passenger rail transport from the problem-riddled Passenger Rail Agency of SA to cities and provinces. Archive photo: Ashraf Hendricks<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Activist group #UniteBehind has issued a letter of demand to the President and Minister of Transport to demand quick action on commuter rail.<\/li>\n<li>They are calling for PRASA\u2019s board to be sacked and for the rail agency to be placed under judicial management or business rescue until metros or provinces can take over.<\/li>\n<li>But recent comments from a minister and ANC policy chief suggest that the government does not want to hand over the passenger rail agency, contrary to published policy and legislation.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Commuter activist group #UniteBehind has urged President Cyril Ramaphosa and Minister of Transport Fikile Mbalula to dissolve the board of the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA), appoint a new board and move passenger rail to the metros and provinces. But recent comments from another minister suggest that the party will resist attempts to shift control of commuter rail.<\/p>\n<p>In a 24 January letter of demand addressed to the President and Minister of Transport, #UniteBehind demands that<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"leave\" height=\"1\" id=\"gu_counter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/president-urged-to-sack-prasas-board-and-hand-over-passenger-rail.gif\" width=\"1\"><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the Minister of Transport dissolve the current PRASA board and appoint a competent new board;<\/li>\n<li>PRASA be placed under judicial management or business rescue;<\/li>\n<li>independent engineers be appointed to resolve the Siyangena matter (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/high-court-sets-aside-dodgy-siyangena-contracts\/\">pending since 2020<\/a>); and<\/li>\n<li>plans be made with municipalities that have commuter rail infrastructure to ensure that the service is handed over as soon as possible, in Cape Town and Gauteng in particular.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>#UniteBehind set a deadline of 14 February. If these demands are not met by then, the group intends to go to court.<\/p>\n<p>Devolution of commuter rail transport has been official government policy since the publication of the 1996 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gov.za\/documents\/national-transport-policy-white-paper\">National Transport Policy White Paper<\/a>. This policy has been confirmed in subsequent White Papers, including the most recent one from 2022, and in law, with the National Land Transport Act of 2009 saying that commuter rail should be located \u201din the appropriate sphere of government\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis has been <a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/how-close-cape-town-to-taking-over-commuter-rail\/or%20commuter%20rail%20from%20national%20government%20to%20the%20City.\">asking <\/a>Mbalula to pass on responsibility for commuter rail in the city. The City of Cape Town already completed a business plan in 2018 and is currently developing a feasibility study for the takeover of commuter rail. The Gauteng Provincial government has also indicated a wish to take over from the crisis-riddled PRASA.<\/p>\n<p>But remarks by Mmamoloko Kubayi, Minister of Human Settlements and head of the ANC\u2019s economic transformation subcommittee, <a href=\"https:\/\/sundayworld.co.za\/news\/state-will-keep-dysfunctional-prasa\/\">published in the Sunday World last week<\/a>, suggest that, contrary to policy documents and legislation, the government\u2019s stance is to resist devolution. \u201cWe can\u2019t give it to metros. On policy we would not agree, and we have not made these proposals, and this will not change,\u201d said Kubayi to the Sunday World.<\/p>\n<p>On Monday, Hill-Lewis <a href=\"https:\/\/www.capetown.gov.za\/Media-and-news\/President%20Ramaphosa%20must%20confirm%20whether%20the%20ANC%20is%20binning%20plans%20to%20devolve%20rail%20to%20the%20City%20of%20Cape%20Town\">released a statement<\/a> calling on the President to clarify whether Kubayi\u2019s comments were, in fact, government policy.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are ready to re-establish a viable rail service in the best interests of commuters, and we are ready to work with national government at any time to achieve this. The fact is rail has collapsed nationally. PRASA now only transports 3% of the passengers it did a decade ago nationally. PRASA is now bankrupt, with billions lost to corrupt deals, including trains too big for the tracks. Change is long overdue,\u201d wrote Hill-Lewis.<\/p>\n<p>He said his latest correspondence with Mbalula indicated that the minister\u2019s department was developing a \u201cDevolution Strategy\u201d, to be completed in 2024.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"article_copyright\">\n<p>\u00a9 2023 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nd\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.<\/p>\n<p>We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, <b>not tracking<\/b> users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/president-urged-to-sack-prasas-board-and-hand-over-passenger-rail.jpg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/\">Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Activist group #UniteBehind has urged President Cyril Ramaphosa to speed up the handover of passenger rail transport from the problem-riddled Passenger Rail Agency of SA to cities and provinces. Archive photo: Ashraf Hendricks Activist group #UniteBehind has issued a letter of demand to the President and Minister of Transport to demand quick action on commuter [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":248230,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9928,3247],"tags":[28001],"class_list":{"0":"post-248229","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-groundup","8":"category-news","9":"tag-groundup","10":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/president-urged-to-sack-prasas-board-and-hand-over-passenger-rail.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}