Jakavula gets Spoornet's empowerment plan on track ... and promises profits within a year

11 Aug 2000 - By Staff reporter

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GETTING SPOORNET firmly into the black is no mere pipe-dream in the mind of chief executive Zandile Jakavula. Since assuming his post at the beginning of this year he has had two major targets - moving the Transnet parastatal from loss to profit and getting more blacks into senior positions.
And black women have played a leading role in his projects. I now have two in top executive positions and four qualified as engineers. If you look closely as the trains go by, you will also find there are now five black women train drivers as well.
It doesn't end there. A total of 28 women number among the 49 employees undergoing training in this latter category..
In all our regions more than 50% of the top executives are black people, he says. There are 11 black men engineers on board as well as the women, and we have a total of 160 qualified black train drivers.
I think this is a significant step forward from the position in 1996 when there was no single black train driver or engineer. All senior posts at that stage were filled by whites. Blacks were found only in lower-level structures.
But more importantly Jakavula wants each person, regardless of colour, to perform to his required target levels in order to swing the Spoornet loss factor into a profit margin within the next year.
He had been sorting out Metrorail's financial headaches for the three years prior to taking up his new post, and turned that organisation from its sorry financial state to an R85m profit for the financial year which ended in February. It was a performance which clearly encouraged the Transnet board of directors to put him in his new role.
I want to believe that it is for these reasons that the board decided to appoint me to this hot seat, he says One of my undertakings to the board was to restructure the company and place people where they would perform better, based on their individual skills.
I am satisfied that that is working. We will have the report of the investigation committee into the entire operation by end September, and I am confident that we as a team in Spoornet will be seen to be making things happen.