Own It

MO: Molweni Jasper from Sedgefield. Or was that Sledger from Jaspfield?

JC: Sledger? That is just so not cricket, old chappie!

MO: Just read this article by a Brit movement, outlining ten reasons why privatisation will always fail.

JC: Ten. Should have been a dozen. Oh wait, Britain also decimalised. [Sings the lame old Decimal Dan]. Let me have a look. [pats pocket, looking for specs]

MO: Number one is “public services are natural monopolies” - can’t fault that.

JC: Oops. Privatising failed in the country that invented rail. British Rail has reverted to government. Yet we are doing it right now. Transnet is all over the media talking about 11 corridors that other vendoes have concessioned for. Of course, they don’t quite include passenger rail.

MO: Would that come under cherry picking? Chuck out passenger rail because it makes no profit? The others are waste, fragmention, wrong incentives, inadequate regulation, lack of flexibility, loss of capacity, risk of bailouts.

JC: Ja, you know, the usual. Forget the tiny fact that rail, everywhere in the world , means civilasation. The USA is primitive, because it never got passenger rail right. Just sayin’, President Quixote. China, the only country to uplift half a billion people out of poverty, is the passenger rail leader. Has ‘capitalist activist’ Rob Hersov even been on a South African train? [sings] I won- der …[Maeder joins the stoep chorus]

MO: Also wondering, could you get from Sedgefield to Colesberg by train, now?

JC: Ayikona. But I could have have fifty years ago, taking three days! Depart George 1am, Oudtshoorn 4.27am, Kipplaat midday. Vrek in the waiting room overnight, then all day to Rosmead. Ditto to Noupoort,then another train to Colesberg in the small hours. Eish.

MO: Met ys, ja, Met ys. You do realise that sort of timetable is not an advert for public railway, right? Possible advert for privatisation.

JC: You say that. But Transet was privatised, government as sole shareholder, and now we have NO MAIN LINE passenger trains.

MO: Awkward! The Ownit document mentions ‘cutting corneys’ and ‘cherry picking’. Transnet effetively abandoned passenger rail because they were too challenged to make it pay for itself?

JC: Exactly. In fairness, it must have been near impossible for clerks, sitting in Braamfontein, poring over piles of possibly hand-written schedules, to co-ordinate passenger trains in an age when there were few telephones. They were lucky if they could get permission to telegram a query to a rail depot, and they were not allowed more than 15 words.

MO: I can imagine: GERT HERE STOP WHAT TIME DOES MAIL TRAIN PASS THROUGH DORSBULT.

JC: Ja. No wonder, once they had any kind of schedule at all, they never tried again. Today, you can get a running schedule, co-ordinating trains from all over the country - or the continent - with a few hours of preparing a prompt and a minute of AI smarties.

MO: Does this sound familier? “Taxpayers have to pick up the pieces when privatisation goes wrong, while shareholders walk away with the profit.”. They are on the money, boet. Here is the link.