The terrible price SA has been forced to pay.

The looting of Prasa, South Africa’s passenger rail service, began around 2012 under the leadership of CEO Lucky Montana. If you want to understand the extent of the corruption, a Treasury investigation into 216 contracts awarded by Prasa between 2012 and 2015 found that only 13 were legitimate. The total value of the contracts was around R15 billion.

The result of this corruption has been the destruction of South Africa’s commuter rail service. In 2010, rail passengers made more than 500 million train trips a year. By 2022, this figure had fallen to 19 million. In Cape Town, the major Metrorail line serving disadvantaged communities, including Khayelitsha and Mitchell’s Plain, has not been operational since 2019.

According to estimates, this has forced 1 million more passengers to travel on the roads daily, whereas before they would have used the train. So if you’re a Capetonian frustrated by the terrible traffic in the city in recent years, you can trace it pretty directly back to the looting of Prasa.

Read more at Daily Maverick: How Prasa was looted and scrapped

Now let’s talk about Transnet, the government custodian of ports, railways and pipelines. Transnet is in charge of trains that carry freight rather than people.

As the Guptaleaks investigations revealed, the scale of Transnet corruption was the largest since the Arms Deal in the 1990s. To take just one example, in 2014 a contract was signed with the China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation to buy just over 1,000 locomotives for a price of R54.4 billion, with almost a quarter of that value going to Gupta companies.

Of the trains that have arrived so far from this contract, they have arrived late and practically unusable. This, combined with the full picture of Transnet corruption and a growing problem with criminal syndicates stealing cables, has meant that the ability of local businesses to transport their goods by rail has been drastically reduced.

Read more at Daily Maverick: Transnet’s recovery looks promising, but it will be a long road

How are these goods transported now? Through trucks. Which is presenting enormous problems for the roads and for traffic. In fact, the sheer volume of trucks on the roads is destroying road infrastructure. This is the reason for many of our potholes, because the roads simply cannot handle these types of hits. Trucks also account for almost 10% of fatal accidents on South African roads these days, according to a recent study by the Road Management Traffic Corporation.

Together, the collapse of Prasa and Transnet has made our lives more difficult in multiple ways. That’s what happens with corruption. It is not just an abstract concept. Take down the nations. And that’s why we need civil society and we need journalism. Expose corruption and pressure those in power to hold the corrupt accountable. DM

Read more at Daily Maverick: State of the Media News Center