The Railway Safety Regulator (RSR) might not be a household name, but it plays a pivotal role in sustaining the lifeblood of South Africa’s transportation network, connecting industry and factories to retailers, homes and communities across the land.
You might think that controlling our railways must be a lot easier a responsibility of the people charged with looking after our rail sector. After all, trains run on tracks, so surely nothing much can go wrong?
“The Railway Safety Regulator has, throughout its existence, been a beacon of excellence in the transportation industry, a guardian of safety, reliability, and efficiency within our railway systems,” says Ms. Nompumelelo Sibongile Ekeke, who was appointed as Chairperson of the Board in December 2023.
“We consider ourselves as the lifeblood of the nation as we connect communities, we import commodities and raw materials and we promote development around the country through our rail infrastructure, which is essential for the operation of so many industries,” adds Ekeke, who heads a power-packed board that includes five other highly experienced female board members. One of the hallmarks of the rise of Germany after the Second World War was their pride in running a highly efficient rail system that was as reliable as a bucket of Swiss watches! If a country’s rail system is slow and unreliable it will cause havoc with factories and retailers around the country, and poorly maintained tracks can lead to accidents… and an accident on a railway line is a hundred times more complex and difficult to clean up than the average road smash.
“Our primary function is regulatory oversight, so we have a strong focus on compliance, monitoring and the enforcement of safety measures within the railway sector, but we also set up and uphold safety standards that our operators have to comply with before we will issue them with the permits, they need to use the country’s rail networks,” explains Ekeke. RSR also conducts inspections to ensure that operators are in compliance in terms of all the regulatory frameworks and standards that the Regulator has issued. Most of these inspections are planned ahead of time due to the intense scheduling involved in the railway industry… also operators don’t always have a heads-up about a visit from the RSR!
“Many of our inspections are planned, but some of the inspections are spontaneous visits to the operators, for obvious reasons, to ensure that standards are being maintained and adhered to even when they aren’t expecting us to visit them. It’s the only way to guarantee consistent adherence to the standards that are needed to operate a safe and reliable industry,” adds Ekeke. The Regulator naturally plays a major part in investigating rail-related incidents and accidents, from collisions to derailments, and in particular when there have been fatalities.
“It is our responsibility is to go into that space and physically conduct the investigations in order to ensure that we get to the bottom of the situation and are able to deliver an impartial report on what happened,” says Ekeke.
The Regulator also communicates and, where possible, integrates with the numerous government agencies that operate within or alongside the rail space, and Ekeke believes it is important to create those networks and establish forums within the country. One example is the South African Police Services, but they also invite local government to sit on some of their stakeholder forums and are also highly welcoming of academia.
“We need academia to partner with us, and already we have partnered with the University of Pretoria to ensure that there’s constant research and knowledge-seeking processes that can help to inform our decisions. By bringing in some of the brightest minds in the country it offers priceless benefits to us as we look to upgrade the rail industry with all the new technologies and other advances happening globally. So we believe it is essential that the decisions we take are supported by informed research,” says Ekeke, who adds that the RSR is open to partnering with a wide range of societies and communities because rail touches the lives of so many people and organisations, and the Regulator is always open to hearing the suggestions and opinions of all stakeholders in terms of how safety within the rail sector can be improved.
As Chairperson of the RSR Board, Ekeke’s primary responsibility is to provide strategic direction and leadership to guide the organisation’s three-year and five-year strategies, but another major role is dealing with the many challenges that lie waiting to derail the Regulator. “Our biggest challenge is ensuring the compliance to safety regulations among our operators, and although we have controls in place and planned and unplanned inspections, the issue of enforcement remains a challenge,” she admits. “Fostering the culture of accountability among our operators is also challenging because people love shifting the blame or accountability onto other parties, or to the government.
The long-term frustrations from compliance apathy among operators is that, in order for the industry to drive innovation and draw investment into rail, it requires much more than the trains running on time: it’s essential that there is excellence in safety, sustainability and reliability. Operators who play fast and loose with compliance make the job of the RSR tougher to attract innovation and investment that will benefit everyone in the industry.
“The issue of compliance is also so important in order to instil confidence in our passengers,” adds Ekeke, who has also faced the immense challenge of rising to the top in a heavily male-dominated industry. Her experience has inspired her to have a deep commitment to fostering change through promoting leadership opportunities and the inclusion of women in the industry. “There are different challenges that women are faced with in the rail industry, and I want to sensitise our stakeholders, government entities and civil societies to come on board so that we can create a platform where there’s networking for women to improve themselves and to get support. I’m not saying that women must get special preference, but for a start to make sure the working environment is safe for women, to create a real culture of safety, but also to ensure that the environment is comfortable for them to thrive and to grow as they earn their opportunities within the industry,” adds Ekeke.
On 8 December 2023, the Cabinet’s decision saw the appointment of a new RSR board who bring a wealth of expertise and diverse perspectives to the orginisation. Ms. Nompumelelo Sibongile Ekeke, Mr. Sisa Lunga Mtwa (Deputy Chairperson) and Adv. Johannes Collen Weapond were re-appointed as they played an instrumental role in the RSR’s past successes. The continuity of these three board members, along with the expertise that the new Board members bring, offer the RSR the strength to tackle the challenges that lie ahead of the industry.
“The most important message to get across to the local and international business community as well as the South African public is our unwavering commitment to excellence, safety, reliability, and sustainability. Those things are the most important things that we have to commit ourselves to, because those are regulated. We can’t have a service that operates today but tomorrow it’s not working, because that creates instability and breaks the very trust, we are working so hard to build with our stakeholders, in particular the passengers and the investors,” says Ekeke, before adding that professionalism and good governance are two of her personal goals for the Regulator.
“South Africa has been tainted with a lot of stories around the issue of poor governance in a lot of our state entities, but I can confidently say that we at the Railway Safety Regulator pride ourselves in good governance. We’ve got controls in place, and my mission is to ensure that the industry upholds its superb levels of excellence in terms of safety, but that at the same time we align functions with the prescripts of the regulation, among others, the National Rail Policy white paper of 2022,” concludes Ekeke.
