Creecy aims to turn private investment into 600 million Prasa passenger trips

Transport Minister Barbara Creecy chose this past Sunday, 26 October 2025, to launch what could be the most significant reimagining of passenger rail in a generation, or the latest in a long line of ambitious announcements that does more damage to Metrorail’s already shattered image.

The deafening subtext of this passenger rail request for information (RFI) outlines a sector that has been brought to its knees by what one academic described as a “toxic interplay of systemic corruption, endemic mismanagement, and the inevitable physical decay that followed” — more on that later.

Not to belabour the point, but now Minister of Home Affairs but then DA public servant and administration shadow, Dr Leon Schreiber, pointed out in January last year that: between 2019 and 2023, 4,633km of copper cable was stolen from the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa). To put that in perspective — as he painstakingly did — that’s enough cable to stretch from Cape Town to Cairo, twice.

How to save passenger rail

Creecy’s request for information isn’t a tender, she was careful to point out. It’s “an invitation for the market to help us design the future of rail”. The state will retain ownership of both passenger and freight networks, a red line drawn firmly in the sand for those who might confuse private sector participation with the dreaded P-word: privatisation.

“To continue on the recovery path requires additional investment that cannot be carried by our fiscus alone,” Creecy stated with the kind of fiscal candour that has become depressingly common in Government of National Unity Cabinet proclamations.

To understand the scale of what Prasa is attempting, you need to grasp the depth of the abyss it fell into.

The agency that was supposed to move millions of South Africans affordably and safely became a byword for dysfunction. The vandalism during the Covid-19 lockdown, as Creecy noted, was the coup de grâce for a system already on life support. 

With security company contracts terminated, the vultures descended. Cable theft became an industrial operation.

A voice of the rail renaissance 

Passenger volumes collapsed in tandem with service quality. But here’s where it gets interesting from an academic perspective: Pieter Onderwater, a part-time lecturer on public rail transport planning at the University of Cape Town and freelance consultant, has quantified exactly why passengers fled.

In his previous research examining Metrorail’s decline between 2009 and 2019 (the Zuma years), Onderwater identified reliability — in a definition that lumps in service cancellations and poor punctuality — as the primary driver of passenger exodus. 

His elasticity parameter for reliability is simple beauty: for every 1% decrease in reliability, passenger volumes are reduced by 2%.

Onderwater’s research concluded that reliability has a key effect on passenger satisfaction levels, pointing to what he calls the “fix the basics” approach as the strategic imperative. 

The operational data from that dark period tells the story: Fewer than 50% of trains were running on time, or running at all. Published timetables became works of fiction. Passengers voted with their feet, wallets and growing frustration.

By 2024/25, Prasa was reporting an operating deficit of more than R8-billion. It was haemorrhaging credibility faster than it was losing copper cable.

Persistently chugging up recovery hill

But here’s where the narrative gets more complicated, and potentially more hopeful. We reached out to the doomsaying academic to see if this request for information can change his tune.

“The Prasa of the last three to four years is not the same Prasa from the 2010s,” Onderwater told Daily Maverick in an email exchange. The previous iteration was “full of corruption and mismanagement”, but since 2022, the agency has been “busy recovering, slowly but surely”.

The numbers support a cautiously optimistic reading. In the 2024/25 financial year, Prasa deployed R21.1-billion in capex. By the end of May 2025, 35 of 40 service lines had been returned to operation, with approximately 70% of services fully resumed.

Passenger trips nearly doubled from 39.4 million in the prior year to 77 million in 2024/25; still only about 20% of pre-2015 levels, but moving in the right direction.

On-time performance reached 91%, with cancellations limited to just 3%. Customer satisfaction has climbed to 76%, up from below 50% pre-Covid.

“Passengers are happy,” Onderwater says, adding that this satisfaction score compares favourably with most European rail companies, which typically score between 70-80%. The trick has been planning trains more realistically: slower schedules but actually delivered.

Will the private sector save the day?

This is where optimism meets the cold arithmetic of infrastructure finance and the even colder reality of operating subsidised rail in developing economies.

“The private sector will only step in when they can make money,” Onderwater warns. “There is no private charity. Passenger transport in metropolitan areas will always make a loss, almost everywhere in the world.”

Creecy acknowledged this explicitly: the state will always subsidise the urban commuter network to ensure working people have access to “affordable and safe transport”. The PSP models being considered — concessions or Build, Operate, and Transfer (BOT) arrangements similar to Sanral’s toll road model — will need to be structured accordingly.

Onderwater sees some genuine opportunities in the request for information framework. Rolling stock maintenance could be fully privatised, with Prasa leasing trainsets like with the current Gibela contract. 

Real estate development around stations through Prasa Intersite is already attracting investor interest. The fibre network commercialisation has precedent: the Netherlands Railway Company sold its cellphone company for €1-billion after realising it should stick to its core business of running trains.

Thinking beyond 2030

Prasa’s own projections target full infrastructure, operations and service recovery with ridership at pre-2015 levels by 2030. Beyond that, continued modernisation could see ridership double again by 2040-2050, potentially reaching an aspirational 600 million annual journeys.

But this assumes continued capital investment of R15-billion to R20-billion per year, sustained political will, no return to the corruption that nearly killed the agency, and, crucially, that the private sector sees sufficient return to participate meaningfully.

It also assumes Prasa has the “engineering, construction, management capacity available for more investments”, something Onderwater questions given the agency is “so busy working on recovery”.

Transnet is scheduled to issue its first freight request for proposal before the end of 2025, with three more planned for the first half of 2026. No tender awards have been made public yet. The passenger rail request for proposals will follow sometime in 2026, after the request for information submissions are processed.

Holding the line

Creecy’s vision of rail as “the backbone of the national transport system” is not new, it has been an official policy for years. What is new is the brutal honesty about fiscal constraints and the formal invitation for private capital to help build that backbone.

Whether the private sector responds with the kind of patient, long-term capital required to rebuild a vandalised, corroded network while accepting subsidised passenger operations and state ownership is an open question. The freight request for information suggests there is appetite, but with significant conditions attached.

Onderwater’s reliability elasticity research highlights what should be the immediate priority: before building bullet trains, make the current trains show up on time. Prasa seems to have absorbed this lesson with the 91% on-time performance and about 76% customer satisfaction suggesting the basics are being fixed. DM