When Cyril Ramaphosa became president in February 2018, he promised to unlock the bottlenecks suffocating economic growth. Two years later, the single biggest people-mover, the passenger train service, has almost ground to a halt. Ramaphosa's transport minister, Fikile Mbalula, has still not appointed a board of directors to restore capacity to the operation.

After two years without a permanent board of directors, and over a period that has seen train operations deteriorating to less than half on-time performance, the minister of transport seems to be in no hurry to appoint a permanent board of directors for the embattled Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa).

Not only has Prasa been without a permanent board since 2017, it last had a properly appointed permanent chief executive officer in 2015, when Lucky Montana quit in the midst of corruption scandals that cost the passenger operator billions. Since then, there has been a great deal of instability at the management levels of the organisation. Ten of the 14 executive committee members who run Prasa's operating divisions have been out of work for most of the past two years, either placed on special leave, suspended or fired.

This has crippled the operations, with urban...