The Plans Keep Coming, But the Freight Is Off the Rails

By Themba Khumalo

If administrative paralysis and bureaucratic hand-waving could be converted into locomotive power, South Africa’s freight rail network would be the fastest on the planet.

Instead, Transnet Freight Rail (TFR) remains a monument to systemic incompetence, a national drain on wealth creation where multi-billion-rand “turnaround strategies” go to die, while the real economy suffocates beneath the weight of hollow promises.

At the recent Joburg Indaba, the people who actually produce the wealth that keeps this economy moving were reduced to asking Transnet for something that should never have been up for negotiation: a railway that works. The primary wealth-creators, the bulk commodity producers who shoulder the country’s tax base and employ tens of thousands, are not asking for favours. They are asking the state to perform the basic function for which its freight rail system exists.

The Industrial Indictment: A Catastrophe “Stabilised”

Listen carefully to the warnings delivered by mining leaders, and the utter despair of the productive economy becomes painfully clear. These are blistering assessments from major industry figures watching their businesses choke on state inefficiency.

Kumba Iron Ore CEO Mpumi Zikalala delivered a devastating customer verdict on Transnet’s performance, describing it as “stability with marginal gains.”

Translate that from executive-speak into plain English: Transnet has merely succeeded in stabilising a catastrophe at an unviable baseline. Stabilising a patient does not mean you have healed them. It simply means you have slightly slowed down the bleeding, while the body remains in critical condition on the operating table.

Zikalala laid bare the real-world cost of this failure. Kumba has been forced to “resize” its operations, a polite way of stating that a premier global miner has been compelled to deliberately suppress production, throttle its own growth, and leave vast mineral wealth buried in the dirt simply because TFR cannot haul the tonnage to port.

The crisis on the Ore Export Corridor connecting the Northern Cape to Saldanha Bay is equally stark. Maryke Burger, CEO of ARM Ferrous, pointed out that industry had urged Transnet to issue a Request for Qualification for private sector participation on the corridor during 2026.

Transnet’s response? Missed deadlines, bureaucratic backsliding, and mounting backlogs.

Burger warned that Northern Cape iron ore resources have a finite lifespan; until rail and port capacity are restored, South Africa is actively throwing away value creation that can never be recovered.

Perhaps the most damning exposure of the void inside Transnet came from Pulane Kingston, CEO of rail supplier voestalpine VAE SA, who stated flatly: “We have not understood that. We do not understand what the strategy is to date.”

Think about what that means. A company that supplies critical rail infrastructure to Transnet is saying it cannot understand the strategy supposedly guiding the rehabilitation of the network. Kingston was therefore calling for independent technical assessments of the main freight corridors and proposing two emergency “war rooms”, one dedicated to rail infrastructure and another to operations.

The people who are supposed to be working with Transnet to restore the railway are effectively asking for outside intervention because they cannot see a coherent plan from inside the organisation. That is not a minor communications failure. It is a profound failure of operational leadership.

Which brings us to the executive suite at Transnet, the Department of Transport, and the Presidency.

Excuses, Fire Sales, and the Endless Parade of Plans

For years, government corridors have buzzed with the high-sounding rhetoric of logistics committees, master plans, national freight roadmaps, and crisis task teams. Yet after decades of recycled “turnaround strategies” and policy papers, nothing has materialised on the tracks that is remotely worth celebrating.

At some point, the question stops being whether the railway has problems and becomes whether the people responsible for fixing them are capable of doing so.

Instead, corporate South Africa was treated to Transnet Group CEO Michelle Phillips pushing back against complaints over the glacial pace of reform. Her defence? Claiming that comparable rail overhauls internationally “take years” and that she is focused on “quality and value rather than simply moving quickly.”

This is the classic shield of an administrator completely out of solid answers: hiding behind international benchmarks to justify bureaucratic inertia while the economy bleeds out.

Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary action, not textbook excuses borrowed from foreign jurisdictions that operate under entirely different economic conditions. South Africa does not have the luxury of “years” for Transnet’s leadership to figure out how to run a heavy-haul rail line. Commodity super-cycles do not pause while state entities attempt to locate their operational spine.

Worse still was Phillips’ candid admission regarding Transnet’s dire financial position: “I don’t have another asset to sell this year,” referring to the previous sale of a 49% stake in the Durban container terminal.

Read that again. The head of the country’s freight infrastructure is effectively saying there is nothing else left to sell this year. This is what happens when asset disposal starts looking like a financial strategy rather than an emergency measure. Core national assets are being flogged off to help keep a failing system afloat, while the underlying operational problem remains unresolved.

That is not a recovery strategy. It is a fire sale.

The Tough Questions State Executives Must Face

If Phillips, her executive board, and her political overseers expect the public to take their endless “turnaround” parade seriously, they must face these immediate, uncomfortable questions:

1. Who is actually in technical command of TFR? If key industrial suppliers need independent engineers to conduct corridor audits because Transnet cannot articulate its rehabilitation plan, does current leadership even possess the basic operational competence to fix the network?

2. Is selling off assets the only plan left? Having sold off a chunk of the Durban terminal and admitting there is nothing left on the block, what is the strategy when the current cash injection runs out, and TFR still fails to haul basic volumes?

3. When does accountability replace excuses? TFR needs to move well beyond 180 million tons a year just to break even. If the people running it cannot get the railway to the level required to sustain itself, why should anyone continue pretending that another recovery plan, another budget allocation or another year of the same leadership will produce a different result?

4. Why is limited private participation stalled? Limited, strictly controlled private participation on critical heavy-haul corridors is not full privatisation. It is a targeted, surgical intervention to inject capital, precision engineering and operational discipline. Why is Transnet treating limited, strategic partnerships like a slow, painful concession rather than an immediate operational necessity?

Stop the Parade, Bring Back the Real Adults

It is time to end this expensive parade loaded with excuses, grandstanding committees, and theoretical roadmaps that yield no tonnage on the tracks.

The goal here is not an indiscriminate, wholesale giveaway of sovereign national infrastructure. There must be limited, highly targeted private participation where necessary, combined with absolute operational accountability.

If the current executive structure and political oversight cannot do more than preside over decay, hide behind international benchmarks and sell off national assets to keep freight on rail, then they have no business running Transnet.

South Africa does not need another committee, another recovery plan or another parade of managerial excuses. It needs people who understand railways, freight, engineering and the brutal discipline of making things work.

Bring back the real adults, the seasoned operational minds and technical experts who know the difference between managing a crisis and actually fixing one.

Transnet cannot be allowed to spend another year explaining why the trains are not moving while billions in economic value are lost and the country picks up the bill.