Furious commuters who were fed-up with the slow Metrorail trains attacked two single mothers of the United National Transport Union (UNTU) in two separate incidents in Gauteng on Tuesday night.
 
The two traumatised sole providers of their families fear for their lives every day when they leave home to work for the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa), the operator of Metrorail.
 
“I would resign today if I had another plan to earn a living. It hurts me so that I don’t know if I will return home to see my children (15) and (3). It is a terrible feeling,” Thomina Mashiangsko (39), a train driver, told Steve Harris, General Secretary of UNTU.
 
Octavia Zondo (33), a metro guard, says her mother prays that she will return home alive every day. “I am so afraid to go to work, but if I don’t, my family will have nothing on the table to eat. I provide for my daughter (13), my mother and my little sister,” she told Harris.
 
Mashiangsko was on route from Johannesburg with an overcrowded train on Tuesday night when she realised that one of the commuters standing between the coaches had broken one of the cables. She managed to continue with the faulty train to the Elandsfontein Station where a female technical worker was waiting to fix the cable.
 
“I pulled in on platform 2. The commuters realised that there was something wrong. I tried to explain to them, but they started stoning my cabin. The technician got into the cabin from the other side. We were hiding in the cabin for more than an hour listening to the commuters stoning the cabin, searing at us and threatening to kill us. I called for Protection Services to come and help me, but they never came,” says Mashiangsko.
 
She even tried to make a video to scare the commuters off, but that did not help. She has been a train driver for the past seventeen years. Mashiangsko can’t even recall how many times she has been attacked by commuters. She works on manual authorisation because the signalling system is out of order.
 
In December she was booked-off on stress leave and went to see a psychologist. “it is of no help as you know you have got no alternative but to return to the same dangerous working condition,” she says.
 
Zondo was on route from Johannesburg when the train got stuck at the Cleveland station where they had to wait for manual authorisation.  The commuters managed to bulldoze the door of her train driver and assaulted him badly.
 
She fled the cabin and ran to the N2 highway where she waited an hour for Protection Services to assist her. “I was petrified. I did not know if I was going to be raped or if a vehicle was going to hit me. I had nowhere else to go. I was so traumatised I had no voice.”
 
This is the third time Zondo, who has been working for Prasa for three years, was attacked.
 
Harris says Prasa suspended two train drivers and two metro guards today (17 January 2018) after they refused to work without armed protection. UNTU already declared a dispute against the state-owned-enterprise (SOE) at the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA).
 
“As an employer, Prasa has a constitutional duty to ensure that its employees work in a safe environment. Prasa is failing its employees but has the arrogance to act against them. This is shocking. UNTU will not allow Prasa to treat our members like this,” says Harris.
 
He also reminded commuters that the employees of Prasa, especially the train crews, has no control over faulty trains or failing infrastructure that causes delays. “They are mothers and fathers who are trying to provide for their families and serve their communities. They deserve medals, not threats and attacks,” says Harris.

Issued by The United National Transport Union