Pretoria - Transport Minister Dr Blade Nzimande is optimistic that the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) can still be saved.
Nzimande was briefing journalists this afternoon in Pretoria regarding immediate interventions to be set up at Prasa to rectify key problems hampering it’s service to the benefit of its commuters.
He said following President Cyril Ramaphosa’s own first hand account of the difficulties Metrorail commuters experienced every other day, he had been given instructions to urgently ‘steer the ship’ in the right direction without further delay.
The Department of Transport, Nzimande said as such had already hit the ground running with a two-stage structured intervention.
He said he would be appointing a team of Organizational and Performance exerts to undertake a 6 to 8 week organisational analysis of Prasa.
Which upon conclusion are to provide the minister with a report on what had led to the failed implementation of Prasa’s turn-around strategies.
The second phase Nzimande said would involve Prasa having to appoint a Turn-Around Execution Team under his departments watch.
But also to monitor and provide its progress to him and it’s board.
To get things going Nzimande said he would be extending the current interim boards term as of 30 April by another six months.
“I have decided to keep the current board because frankly I don’t like this whole business of constantly having interim boards in place.”
In their tenure they’re (the board) to focus on finalising appointments of key executive vacancies following vetting processes in place.
But most importantly to improve the reliability of trains and trains cancellations by 60% and improve train delays by 41%.
“Because honestly speaking we can’t have a service that is late everyday. People need to be safe and quite frankly the current security company is just not cutting it anymore.”