SCORPIO ANALYSIS: Groundhog Day à la ANC — Prasa Chair Leonard Ramatlakane’s tall train lies By Pieter-Louis Myburgh
My notifications on a certain social media platform — that one awash with blustering inanity instead of facts and reason — light up like the windows in my neighbourhood after a round of rolling blackouts.
You see, the “neoliberal” media, mostly yours truly, had disseminated blatant lies about the corrupt train deal and Prasa’s almost comical misjudgment of the locomotives’ height, all in an attempt to discredit the Zuma government and Montana.But when their inaccuracies creep into public utterances from top officials, like long-serving ANC apparatchik and current Prasa chairperson Leonard Ramatlakane, the record needs to be set straight.
This included a 2014 report from Prasa’s own engineering team that unequivocally found the Afro 4000s to be too tall for the rail lines they were due to traverse. Here’s an extract from the RSR’s findings: “The height of the AFRO 4000 locomotive was measured at 4,140mm, which is 175mm higher than the track maintenance manual requirement of 3,965mm. By exceeding the vehicle gauge, the clearance safety margin between the top of the vehicle and the Overhead Traction Equipment is reduced.”
At the recent press briefing, Ramatlakane relied on that development as the basis for perhaps his most egregious falsehood regarding the locomotives’ suitability for South African railway lines. They were instead put on trucks and driven to the Beitbridge border post, where they were finally put on rail on the Zimbabwean side of the border and then moved to Zambia.
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