Misleading stats mask the true state of SA’s commuter rail
It is not correct to say that the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) serves “millions of commuters in South Africa’s metro regions” (“Prasa task team in race to find options to 600 job cuts”, June 9).
The erroneous reporting is based on Prasa’s disingenuous practice of converting daily passenger trip numbers from across the country into a big annual figure. This is invariably confused with the number of people served by the system.
Earlier this week, when I travelled into central Cape Town on the Southern line (one of the few functional lines nationally), I boarded a train at 8.40am with 14 commuters. This is clearly not a system serving millions of people.
I wish it were, and maybe it could be, but to understand South Africa’s commuter rail and how public transport subsidies are being allocated, there must be transparent reporting by Prasa disaggregated to metros and commuter lines.
When Prasa says 75-million passenger train trips were made last year, that does not mean 75-million people took the train (or that 400-million people took the train every year a decade ago). It means that one commuter could make 480 trips a year if they took the train to school and back every day.
Clear reporting on trip numbers and fare box takings by Prasa would help in the effort to “rebuild rail” for future generations.
Katharine McKenzie
Observatory
Ramaphosa is indeed the ‘Hollow Man’
Describing President Cyril Ramaphosa as the “ultimate Hollow Man” is apt (Letters to the Editor, June 9).
Since 2018 it has been non-stop promises, few of which ever materialise. After eight years as president he is still promising “economic growth, greater investment, industrial expansion, infrastructure development and the creation of millions of new jobs”, as he did in his migration address on June 7.
It’s a bit late in the day, as he must be well aware, which probably explains his dour and lacklustre tone. Come to think of it, he is at his most cheerful and beaming when exchanging an embrace with Vladimir Putin. Perhaps retirement in St Petersburg should be the doctor’s recommendation.
Francois Theron
Via Business Day online
There is little society can do about the crisis of alcohol abuse
Countless societies have wrestled with alcohol abuse. Few have managed to resolve it. Time seems to be the only cure (“South Africa must reckon with its alcohol abuse crisis”, June 9).
The US tried prohibition. That only inspired crime, creating even more social ills. Before that, as the industrial revolution took hold in Britain, drunkenness became such a problem among the working classes that Britain had to introduce pub closing times during the week and on weekends so that workers would pitch up sober at factories in the morning and on Mondays.
With so few South Africans working, this is not much of an imperative here. But your editorial opinion does list the other negative social impacts.
What history teaches us is that you can’t penalise citizens or regulate yourself out of this problem. Nor can you blame the people who make alcohol or somehow get them to pay for the consequences suffered by the people consuming their products.
The only fix is cultural and personal, with each individual learning how to control and manage their drinking. And as anyone who has tried AA or rehab will tell you, this doesn’t happen easily, or often at all. Sometimes you’ve just got to let it play out. Let people either destroy themselves or recover.
I’m not sure what society or “the authorities” such as those in South Africa can do. What I do know is that I’m probably responsible for the creation of at least 10 alcoholics in South Africa simply by giving them jobs. In my experience, from the moment you give a perfectly sober, strong and healthy previously unemployed South African a job, you’ve got 18-24 months before they’re hopeless alcoholics who can no longer work.
In rural Transkei I regularly see people pooling their social grants to buy a bakkie load of booze at the beginning of each month. The four-day party that ensues often ends in multiple family stabbings, shootings, axings or rapes, often of grandmothers and children.
This is endemic and happening as we speak across the country. In South Africa taxpayers are literally bankrolling the social and cultural implosion of our society by funding widespread and growing alcohol abuse through social grants.
Sadly, none of these observations provides much insight into, or guidance on, how to manage alcohol abuse in South Africa.
Looking at what happened in the rest of the world doesn’t help much either: those without self-control or unable, perhaps genetically, to either process or manage alcohol eventually work themselves out of the gene pool, and society goes on.
It’s a bleak outlook but not much different from how, in the developed West, drug addiction is also playing out.
Stuart Meyer
Via Business Day online
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