Newsmaker Khanyisile Kweyama vows to clean up Prasa
Come what may, Prasa interim chair vows to clean up rail agency
● Khanyisile Kweyama, who has been fighting an all-out war on corruption at the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) since being appointed interim chair in April, suspects her hijacking and kidnapping in July may have been intended as a warning.
Some of those implicated in corruption allegations still occupy senior positions at Prasa, and she has them in her sights.
She was pepper-sprayed and bundled into the boot of her car before being driven around for three hours and dumped in Katlehong, on the East Rand, along with the car.
It didn’t look like “normal or regular crime”, she says. Her assailants didn’t want her money or her car.
But “if it was about discouraging me from doing the work I’m doing, it didn’t work”, she says.
There have been no arrests.
The auditor-general this week painted a picture of an organisation all but destroyed by corruption, and expressed “significant doubt” about its ability to continue as a going concern.
“This is a concern of the board as well,” says Kweyama, who brings an impressive record in the private sector (CEO of Business Unity SA and executive director of Anglo American SA) to her rescue operation.
The 2016/2017 financial statement, tabled a year late in parliament on Monday and qualified by the auditor-general, shows an organisation that was “just a mess”, she says.
“Governance was completely nonexistent, leadership stability was nonexistent, people just did as they pleased.” Stealing, euphemistically known as “irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure”, was rife.
As she says, none of this is new. It was exposed in the former public protector’s 2013 report, “Derailed”, in various National Treasury reports and in a Werksmans report last year.
The reports have been “sitting on the shelf”. Some of those named have been allowed to remain in management positions, where they have continued stealing.
“That era is over now, those reports are no longer sitting on the shelf,” says Kweyama. Her board will ensure their recommendations are acted on.
“It’s No 1 on our agenda.”
A law firm has been engaged, charges have been handed out and disciplinary processes have begun.
Tenders that were worth R10m or more each are being investigated “and people will be called to account. People have thought they could sit and be corrupt and there will be no consequences. That has now come to a stop. There will be consequences.”
Unless the consequences are seen to be swift and severe, there will be no hope of changing the culture of corruption that still exists at Prasa, she says.
It is also vital for the investment community, ratings agencies and lending institutions to see speedy results, including perpetrators behind bars.
“You’ve got to demonstrate that leadership is in place, consequences are in place, systems are in place.”
She expects perpetrators who have left Prasa to be dealt with quickly by the Hawks, who “have to wake up and do their work”.
Her predecessor, Popo Molefe, took the Hawks to court to compel them to investigate irregular expenditure of more than R14bn, claiming they were protecting “thieves and looters”.
Kweyama’s board has met with new Hawks boss Gen Godfrey Lebeya and will be meeting him regularly to check on progress.
“We are constantly going back to knock at their door,” she says.
She will meet the new acting head of the National Prosecuting Authority, Silas Ramaite, in October to say to him, “we can’t let sleeping dogs lie”.
And disciplining the perpetrators is not enough. She wants the money back.
“The final test will be, can we recover any of this money that has flown out of Prasa in an illicit manner?
“Already we’ve lost a lot of time during which people have managed to get money out and hide it.”
Supply chains were a free-for-all.
“There were just no rules in terms of supply chain management. People were just signing without any delegation.”
Another key element of her rescue plan is getting people back on the trains. This means focusing on train safety to eradicate criminals and accidents. The safety regulator found that Prasa was responsible for 57% of collisions and derailments on local lines, most of them the result of human error.
Kweyama says new drivers are being trained and old ones retrained.
Crime, she says, is made easier by overcrowding, and hopes new trains from Brazil coming into service later this year will take care of this.
Also in her rescue plan is the appointment of qualified executives. “You can have as many rescue plans as you like, but if you don’t have people with the right skills who are permanent and capable of running the organisation, nothing will happen.”
There are too many people in senior management positions in an acting capacity, she says, including her current CEO.
“We need permanent appointments, people who will be accountable, who are on fixed contracts, very clear about what they must achieve and when. They must perform and be measured accordingly.”
Recruitment ads are about to go out, she says.
“We’re going out to market for people who are experienced, tried and tested.”
As SA Express has found, and she found while interim chair of the SABC, attracting suitably qualified people to defunct stateowned organisations is not easy.
“We have to understand that people with good qualifications have an aversion to SOEs [state-owned enterprises]. It is difficult to get them. They don’t want to be associated with SOEs.”
Much like Siza Mzimela at SA Express, Kweyama is relying on the quality of her new board to inspire confidence.
“They have demonstrated that they are professionals and they’re not here to do the usual.”
The trouble is that the board, and she herself, are interim. She agrees they may not be around in a year’s time.
“That is a problem,” she says.
On a roadshow to Prasa stakeholders, “No 1, 2 and 3 on their list” was to appoint a permanent board, “so that they know that this plan is not going to be changed by another board in two months’ or six months’ or a year’s time”.
They’ve been here before, she acknowledges wryly.
People have thought they could sit and be corrupt and there will be no consequences. That has now stopped