HR Pulse

Are Prasa trains under siege?

The Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) finally admitted last night on the current affairs programme, Fokus, on SABC2 that it realized that its trains were under siege from criminals. The organisation stated that the passenger rail operator has taken steps to improve security measures.

Steve Harris, general secretary of the United National Transport Union (UNTU), and Wyndham Evans, president of the union, took a train trip on the notorious central line between Cape Town and Khayelitsha with UNTU executive council member Brian Davids. They discovered that when the emergency button was pressed the was no response nor where the phones answered. "This just proves the point of train drivers as to how vulnerable and exposed they are when a train can’t continue on route, due to whatever reason,” says Harris."

These findings were brought to the attention of Richard Walker, the regional manager of Prasa in the Western Cape. All this comes a month after UNTU asked Lindikhaya Zide, Acting Group Chief Executive of Prasa, in writing on 14 June to immediately ask Walker to resign from his position due to his incompetence to fulfil the mandate of Prasa towards the South African commuters and taxpayers and his inability to implement preventative measures to protect Prasa employees in his region.

The Union made the demand after a rampage of furious commuters at the Cape Town Station on 12 June 2017. Prasa’s spokeperson, Nana Zenani, assured the public on Fokus that several more security officials were deployed to protect their employees and commuters travelling on the trains. Zenani reverted to train safety as a holistic problem and said that Prasa first had to check if they were acting within its mandate if they were issueing its protection officers with firearms instead of battens.

UNTU has filed a supplementary affidavit at the Western Cape High Court asking it to hear the Union’s application on train safety urgently because Prasa has done nothing to improve the working conditions and security of its employees by not implementing additional security measures at stations and on trains along the Central Line, despite the increase in violent incidents over the past month.

Prasa has not yet responded.