Commuters will have to wait months before the full Metrorail service is restored in Cape Town.
Image: GroundUp/Tariro Washinyira
It’s been a nightmare start to 2020 for thousands of long-suffering Cape Town commuters, with Metrorail’s central line and the MyCiTi N2 bus service still suspended — and no sign that the services will be restored any time soon.

The City of Cape Town has no time frame for the reintroduction of the N2 express service to Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain from the city centre. The service was suspended in June last year after a quarrel between the shareholders of the N2 Express company, the Congress of Democratic Taxi Associations (Codeta), the Route 6 Taxi Association and the Golden Arrow Bus Service.

According to the city’s mayoral committee member for transport Felicity Purchase, approximately 4,000 commuters use the service daily.

Luyanda Mtamzeli, from Ilitha Park in Khayelitsha, used the MyCiTi bus service to get to work in Cape Town. He said he had heard rumours about the reason for the suspension, “but I do not know what the truth is”.

He used to spend R450 a month to load his MyCiTi bus card. Now he spends more than R1,000 a month to get to work by taxi. He takes one minibus taxi from Ilitha Park to the Site C taxi rank, then another from Site C to the city centre.“I use R52 a day for a return trip to work. So that is more than R250 a week that goes to transport. But I have decided that I will be using Golden Arrow because it will be much cheaper,” said Mtamzeli.

Purchase said the city was “in consultation with the national department of transport to find an amicable solution”, but could give no date for the resumption of the service.

“We are trying our best to resolve the challenges and to have the buses back on the road. Also, the city is extremely anxious to get the service up and running again because of the near-total collapse of the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) and Metrorail”.

Meanwhile, the southern and northern Metrorail lines are not working properly and service on the central line to Kapteinsklip and Chris Hani stations has been suspended since last October due to vandalism between Bonteheuwel and Nyanga. Only the Lavistown branch of the line is running. The central line runs from Cape Town to Langa, where routes branch to Mitchell’s Plain, Chris Hani/Kapteinsklip and Lavistown. The Lavistown route passes through Belhar and ends in Bellville.

Asked what Metrorail was doing to fix the problem, spokesperson Riana Scott said: “All regions are monitoring performance continuously and reporting diligently to enable our principals to develop cross-functional recovery and maintenance programmes to incrementally address the most critical issues.”

She said it would take “several months at least” to restore the Chris Hani and Kapteinsklip services.The impact of continuous metal theft, vandalism and damage of essential infrastructure remain debilitating. Safety is a priority and operational alternatives are implemented to ensure safe operations, inevitably leading to more frequent stoppages and longer journey times.

“The recovery of the two central corridors will not be a quick fix and it is estimated to be in the medium-term (several months at least). The critical areas that have been decimated by vandalism must be properly enclosed to enable the rebuilding of substations, reinstallation of related infrastructure and installation of new signalling.”

Scott said ticket sales showed that on the central line there were about 23,000 daily weekday trips to Cape Town from Kapteinsklip, and 25,000 from Khayelitsha.

Dalton Ndongeni of Public Transport Voice, an organisation that advocates for quality and equality in the South African public transport sector, said there had been no communication from Metrorail since October on when the service will resume, or the extent of the damage.

He accused the Western Cape minister of transport and public works, Bonginkosi Madikizela, of showing a lack of interest in the working-class struggle to access safe, affordable and reliable transport.

An international team uses “maser” emission phenomena to study a young star located roughly 22,000 light years from the earth.
Image: 123RF/karandaev
Two astronomers from the North-West University (NWU) are part of a 15-country research team that has observed star bursts – or growth spurts – previously unknown to humankind.

“It is a privilege to be at the cutting edge of humanity’s efforts to understand space and celestial bodies, and to have witnessed star behaviour that is entirely new,” said associate professor James Chibueze of NWU’s Centre for Space Research.

Chibueze and Dr SP van den Heever, also from the centre, are part of an international team of astronomers who have been studying a young star located approximately 22,000 light years away from the earth, known as the G358-MM1 high-mass protostar.

While the two NWU astronomers have been observing this star from the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory near Krugersdorp, northwest of Johannesburg, other astronomers have been keeping an eye on it from observatories in Australia, China, Germany, Korea, Japan, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Chile, the UK and the US.What makes G358-MMI so special is that it has been displaying growth spurts that astronomers say are unique.

“The star event we have been observing is the first of its kind to have been recorded from earth,” said Chibueze, who is among the co-authors of a letter published in Nature Astronomy, one of the world’s top-rated academic journals.

Chibueze said the growth bursts of high-mass protostars like G358 are seldom seen by astronomers as these events are rare and difficult to observe directly.

In this case, however, the international research team has been using what is known as “maser” emission phenomena to study the star. Maser is similar to laser but uses microwaves instead of light waves and can be used to monitor and measure activity in space.

Using maser observation, astronomers have been able to capture “heat waves” emanating from the star during what is thought to be growth events. These waves of heat were found to be only slightly slower than light.

While this heat-wave phenomenon has been observed twice before in other high-mass protostars, G358 is different because of the variety of the bursts.

“TheG358-MMI event may therefore represent a new species amongst a ‘zoo’ of high-mass protostar accretion burst varieties,” the letter in Nature Astronomy states.

This “zoo” is likely to diversify as the research team around the world continues to keep tabs on the young star’s activity.

“The team’s discoveries are hugely exciting and we are hopeful that further investigation will reveal more about the physical processes taking place within the G358 star,” added Chibueze.

Mother Uzelle Maine cries as she stands in the spot where her son Siyabong Buthalezi was shot in Windmill Park, Boksburg. Next to her is daughter Letazz Maine and Buthelezi’s grandmother Bernadette Lange.
Image: Kabelo Mokoena
Siyabonga Buthelezi was in his sister’s arms in the yard of his modest Windmill Park home when a stray bullet tore through his little body in the crossfire between rival gang members.

He died in hospital a day after the shooting in the east of Johannesburg. He would have turned one a week later.

The 17-year-old girl was arrested in Waterkloof, Pretoria, on Monday.
Image: iStock
A 18-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl were arrested after a couple were attacked at their Centurion home, police said on Tuesday.

Barnie and Magda van Heerden were attacked at their home in Pierre van Ryneveld Park on Thursday night.

Police spokesperson Brig Mathapelo Peters said their son, Ruan, was arrested for allegedly attacking his parents with a golf club. They were also stabbed.

Magda was airlifted to Milpark Hospital in Johannesburg after the incident.

Peters said Ruan and a girl alleged to have been involved in the attack fled the scene in Barnie’s car, which was found abandoned near Tembisa several hours later.

Ruan was arrested in Aliwal North in the Eastern Cape. He appeared in the Pretoria magistrate’s court on Monday on charges of attempted murder.

The girl was arrested in Waterkloof, Pretoria, on Monday. She is expected to appear in the same court on Tuesday on charges of attempted murder and use of a motor vehicle without the owner’s consent.

Eskom says any claims that it has stage 8 load-shedding planned are fake, “erroneous and incorrect”.

The power utility was slamming reports that it had informed municipalities about such plans.

In a statement, Eskom said in keeping with its obligations in terms of the Disaster Management Act, “we are required to develop contingency plans for identified major incidents. A Severe Supply Constraint is one of these, for which we have plans in place. Eskom also continually improves these plans.”

After 2015, Eskom and the municipalities identified the need to extend the planning in place related to the number of stages of load-shedding. The national code was subsequently updated after significant engagement with stakeholders in 2016/17, said the statement.

“ … Eskom and most municipal suppliers have developed load-shedding schedules that cater for stages 1 to 8. When stage 6 load-shedding was implemented in December, not all metros or municipalities had published their extended load-shedding schedules.

“The Association of Municipal Electricity Utilities (AMEU) therefore engaged most of its members to confirm their compliance to the code — ie whether stages 5 to 8 had been published by those metros that had not yet done so,” said the statement.