S.Africa's Rail Stations In Ruins After Covid Lockdown Plunder

South Africa's railway infrastructure has been ravaged during coronavirus lockdown, with thieves plundering anything from cables and handrails to bricks and doors

Johannesburg, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Mar, 2021 ) :South Africa's railway infrastructure has been ravaged during coronavirus lockdown, with thieves plundering anything from cables and handrails to bricks and doors.

In the strictest months of confinement last year, looters went to work on unguarded stations and railway infrastructure, making off with almost anything that could be ripped off or cut down and carted off.

Kliptown, a train station in the famous Johannesburg township of Soweto, lies in ruins, stripped bare of its windows and doors and even its roof.

Signalling and electric cables have been yanked out. Staircase railings have been sawn off.

Even the perimeter walls have not been spared, with bricks bashed out and hauled away.

"It's like an atomic bomb was thrown here... It's like a tsunami," lamented a community leader, George Mohlala, 37, pointing to the ruined station.

When President Cyril Ramaphosa placed the country under a strict lockdown, railway stations were left unguarded.

More than 80 percent of the country's train stations have been vandalised, the state-owned rail operator Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) said.

What's left of the ticketing office in the Kliptown station are shards of glass -- the only evidence of turnstiles that once functioned here.