Hovels, hoks [slang for makeshift dwellings] and hellholes line both sides of the national road to Cape Town from the airport. Corrugated tin, cardboard, black trash bags, petrol drums and burlap hobbled together with string and wire are used as building materials. Cape Town has always had shanties but now it was overwhelming and extended as far as the eye could see. This slum makes the favelas in Sao Paulo look luxurious by comparison. Smoke oozes out from a shanty saying, “this is my home, someone lives here.” A stray cow walks on the side of the road while an African child strolls with a herd of goats.

“Danger–Gevaar–Ingozi” These are the words in English, Afrikaans and Zulu on signs with a red background and a crudely stenciled skull and crossbones that are now part of the urban fabric. Angle-iron bayonets affixed at an acute angle to the walls that support twelve strands of electrified wire, add further anguish to the painful broken glass crown and sinister cloak that safeguards, protects and shields those that are held hostage unto themselves. The streetscape and thoroughfares in residential neighborhoods have been transformed into hostile environments, devoid of people.

Besides no airlines, no postal service and no trains, there is a dwindling electricity supply. They have rolling blackouts, euphemistically called “load shedding” which can last as much as 10 hours per day in Cape Town. Johannesburg is worse. People survive by always keeping their thermos flasks filled with hot water, using small gas camping stoves and using rechargeable lanterns for light and a healthy supply of batteries and candles at all times. Food rots in refrigerators so one needs to purchase small amounts of groceries just for a day. Few people can afford to have a generator, let alone the exorbitant cost of diesel fuel. Without electricity there is no viable economy. Retail stores, restaurants, businesses and factories cannot operate. The employees are idle and cannot do their job. As a result they are unable to earn a livelihood.

(Image from a different article.)

The sick irony is that the trains that transport coal to the power plants which are their life-giving arteries, no longer operate and cannot deliver coal because the rail lines were stolen off the tracks.

The cartels also sell the best quality coal to China and the inferior coal with “rocks and metal” has to be used.

In the agricultural sector, including processing plants, the lack of electric power has led to the culling of poultry, some 10 million chicks in January of 2023, the wastage of fresh milk without refrigeration and the inability to irrigate crops.

With South Africa being a large exporter of fruit to the UK and the EU, this sector of its economy is now also in serious jeopardy due to inadequate refrigeration.

The continuous damage and theft of infrastructure within the rail environment has far reaching consequences to the Grand Economic Strategy of this country. While the value of the actual property damaged or stolen may run into 10s of thousands of rand, the impact of this on the other hand runs into hundreds of millions of rand.

The lives of our people are actually brought to a standstill as many millions of people rely on the rail environment to travel to and from their places of work. This is a situation we as a country cannot afford to continue given that we are all trying to rebuild the economy from devastation of the Covid-19 we are currently experiencing.