Johannesburg (AFP)

Fresh out of the factory, dozens of gleaming trains are waiting in a warehouse in Pretoria ... to finally get back on track.

Cables torn, stations stripped, South African railways were looted during containment, bringing much of urban traffic to a standstill.

In the enormous Gibela factory (Climb aboard, in Zulu, one of the eleven official South African languages) installed on former corn fields in the small town of Nigel, 50km east of Johannesburg, black workers for the most part are busy making from scratch the latest, very comfortable, tilting "people's trains" with wifi.

This mega factory has a great future: 600 trainsets, or 3,600 cars, must come out of its bowels by 2030 and make it the fastest train factory in the world, proudly advances the branch of the French manufacturer Alstom in Southern Africa.

Born from a consortium between the South African company Ubumbano Rail and the world number 2 in rail, the plant has an exclusive contract of 2.8 billion euros with the South African public railway company (Prasa ) and represents one of the biggest investments in South Africa since the end of apartheid.

But across the country, which has embarked on an ambitious plan to modernize the network, from Johannesburg to Pretoria to Cape Town, the vacuum created by containment, one of the strictest in the world, imposed in April to fight the pandemic of Covid-19, left the field open to large-scale theft.

In the township of Langa near Cape Town, some have ended up taking up residence on the deserted railway lines, where small tin shacks have started to grow.

- "War zone" -

In Kliptown, one of the historic districts of Soweto, the station which usually brews tens of thousands of workers every day is nothing more than an empty carcass: roofs, doors, windows, everything has been washed away.

Even bricks from the walls were chiseled off.

And some residents take the opportunity to illegally divert electricity from disused stations to their homes.

"It's as if an atomic bomb had been dropped here," laments George Mohlala, 37, a representative of the local community.

"A war zone", he continues, slaloming between the holes dug on the quays to extract the copper cables.

Only the pieces that are too heavy to take are left, he points out, pointing to rusty pieces of weed-overrun railroad tracks.

According to Prasa, more than 80% of stations were devastated while the country was fighting the pandemic, the damage amounted to billions of rand (several tens to several hundreds of millions of euros).

The looting of rail infrastructure is nothing new in South Africa, but there it has reached its peak.

- "It's a mess" -

Stuck for several hours in a train blocked by the theft of cables, President Cyril Ramaphosa had already qualified the phenomenon of "economic crime".

Zodwa Mangena, 40, last took the train a year ago.

"It's a mess," plague the saleswoman, forced to travel by minibus taxi.

"It's expensive," she laments.

"We should have done something to prevent that," acknowledges the president of Prasa, Leonard Mamatlakane, to AFP.

But no one had seen it coming ...

Without rails, stations or signaling, how will Alstom's brand new blue and white trains run?

"We are going to deploy everywhere," Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula told AFP.

"We are repairing infrastructure that has been vandalized."

Last week, the minister launched a program to recruit railway safety officers from residents near stations.

And the government has already shipped sixteen trainsets to Cape Town and Durban, out of the fifty produced since 2018.

"We do not make trains to make works of art. They are not made to be stored or to end in a museum", insists the CEO of Gibela, Hector Danisa.

© 2021 AFP