The Gautrain is one of the largest Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) ever undertaken in Africa. The PPP model is precisely what has made the Gautrain one of the most consequential pieces of economic infrastructure this province has ever built.
The concession agreement between the Gauteng Provincial Government and Bombela Concession Company (Pty) Ltd (BCC) will come to an end on 27 March 2026. As one of South Africa’s largest and most successful PPP projects, the Gautrain will continue operating under the PPP model beyond this date, ensuring stability, continuity and sustained private-sector participation.
Since 2010, the system has contributed R46 billion in economic value to Gauteng. For every rand invested, R1,72 is returned to the province. Some 245 000 jobs have been created through property development alone around its stations, and approximately 59% of all major office development in the province now clusters around Gautrain nodes. These are not coincidences of geography. They are the direct result of what reliable, high-frequency rail does to the value of land and the decisions of investors.
Why business cannot afford to ignore this
The province’s roads are approaching a crisis that no amount of resurfacing or intersection upgrades will resolve. Transport modelling projects that peak-hour highway speeds will drop to 10 kilometres per hour by 2037. A province moving at walking pace haemorrhages productivity, investment and talent. The solution is not more roads. It is rail.
For businesses specifically, the cost is already visible. A workforce that spends two hours in traffic each way arrives depleted, departs early and delivers less.
A city where suppliers cannot move goods predictably is a city where supply chains become unreliable. Infrastructure investment is often framed as a government responsibility. The productivity dividend of that investment, however, accrues directly to the private sector. The Gautrain is a subsidy to business competitiveness that does not appear on any company’s balance sheet.
A recent brand valuation study found that 85% of Gautrain users travel to work, and the reasons they keep coming back are reliability, efficiency and safety. Businesses that locate near Gautrain stations are not simply buying proximity to a train. They are buying access to a workforce that arrives reliably, a talent pool that extends across the province and an address that signals seriousness to clients and investors.
Why the PPP model works
Government brings the asset, the mandate and the long-term vision. The private sector brings operational expertise, capital discipline and the performance standards that public institutions alone struggle to sustain consistently. The Gautrain Management Agency has maintained above 90% availability and punctuality for fifteen consecutive years, earned a 13th consecutive clean audit and received the 2025 Integrated Reporting Award in the Public Sector category from the Chartered Governance Institute of Southern Africa. This is what well-structured PPP governance produces, and it is the standard the incoming operator is expected to match.
Minister of Finance Enoch Godongwana made the government’s position on PPPs explicit in his recent Budget Speech, encouraging public institutions to pursue private partnerships as a viable delivery model. The Gautrain is not an outlier in that framework. It is the proof of concept.
The Gautrain has not been without cost to the public purse. But few infrastructure projects anywhere in the world reach operational maturity without subsidy support, and the economic value generated over fifteen years makes a compelling case that the investment was justified. By 27 March 2026, the capital costs of establishing the Gautrain will have been fully settled.
The province enters the next concession period with a fully paid-up asset valued at R45 billion and a mandate to refurbish, upgrade and modernise the system over the next 15 years.
Transport sector is far more than infrastructure. It forms the foundation of a well-functioning society. It facilitates trade, drives tourism, fuels small business, and connects people to each other and to opportunity. An integrated, people-focused transport network is essential to any inclusive and sustainable growth strategy.
The next chapter of value creation
Gauteng cannot build its future on roads alone. Adding lanes does not solve a problem that is fundamentally about volume and density. What solves it is moving more people through less space, faster and more reliably. Rail does that at a scale roads cannot match.
The Gautrain has proactively identified underserved customer groups and tailored its products and services to meet their specific needs, making travel more accessible for a diverse range of passengers. A key initiative is KlevaMova, which offers a 50% discount on train fares to qualifying low-income earners, learners, pensioners, and recipients of SASSA disability grants. Since its launch in May 2025, thousands of eligible passengers have already registered for KlevaMova. In addition, students under the age of 25 benefit from a 50% discount through the Student Product, introduced in 2022, reinforcing Gautrain’s dedication to supporting young commuters.
The proposed extension of the network into Soweto, Fourways, Lanseria and Mamelodi is a social imperative. Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi has announced an investment in that extension, with Phase One linking Marlboro through Sandton, Randburg and Cosmo City already gazetted. Plans provide for nearly 300km of new track reaching into suburbs and communities rather than only connecting major nodes, including some of the highest-growth residential markets in the province and communities with significant unmet commercial demand.
The proposed extensions are also, at their core, a spatial justice intervention. They connect communities that apartheid planning deliberately placed far from economic opportunity. For developers, that framing is also a market signal: where access improves, demand follows. Precincts such as Marlboro, sitting between Alexandra and the Sandton CBD, illustrate the model precisely. High-density, mixed-use development anchored by rapid rail, with feeder services reaching into surrounding communities, is not speculative. It is already happening.
The station is not just a place where trains stop. In a city that functions well, the station is the address everything else organises itself around. Gauteng is becoming that city. For the business community, the question is not whether to take the Gautrain seriously. It is whether they can afford not to.
Kedibone Diale-Tlabela is Gauteng MEC for Roads and Transport
How Amapiano’s first lady is defining her own lane:
I remember the first time I heard of Nobantu Vilakazi, it was in a Musa Keys’ song, Vula Mlomo, in 2021.
Every taxi, tavern, club and bottle store played it as though it were stitched into the national soundtrack of that year.
The bass travelled through minibus speakers with a slight crackle, it poured into township streets on warm afternoons and it followed you into late-night grooves where amapiano was less a genre and more a shared pulse.
But beyond the production, beyond the now-iconic log drum bounce, it was her chant that captured most of us. She delivered it with so much conviction and belief that it didn’t feel like a background element; it felt like a statement.
There was authority in her tone. Certainty. The kind of presence that makes you stop mid-conversation and ask: “Who is that?” even when the rest of the country seems
to know.
Years later, that same assuredness remains intact.
“I say Nobantu Vilakazi is a young woman in the entertainment industry,” she tells me. “I’m a DJ, I’m a vocalist, I’m a songwriter and I’m a hitmaker.”
Then comes the title many fans have long echoed.
“I’m the first lady of amapiano.”
It’s a bold claim in a genre that has often centred on male producers and DJs but she doesn’t waver. When I ask whether the title invites criticism, she answers plainly: “No, I can’t get in trouble because people gave me that.”
In many ways, they did. Through chants that became cultural markers. Through performances that lingered long after the set ended. Through
a tone that felt township-rooted yet globally resonant.
Although amapiano might be where many discovered her, her foundation runs deeper. Before the chants that dominated airwaves, she was immersed in the house scene as a DJ.
“DJing was my first love,” she says. “I was a DJ in the house scene first. And by God’s grace, something happened that made me record a song and that song actually worked out. And my first gig was not as a DJ but as a performer.”
That pivot could have easily boxed her into a singular identity but she refused to let it.
“I came back to DJing because I just wanted to enhance all my skills and be a powerhouse and not limit myself to being just a singer,” she explains. “It’s very nice being a singer but that is not where I want to end.
I also want to venture into production. Right now I just want to be a woman that does everything in the music scene.”
The refusal to be one-dimensional has defined her steady rise. When amapiano was finding its footing, she didn’t approach it cautiously.
“I don’t wanna lie, I wasn’t scared,” she says. “I was actually excited to try out the new sound.”
At the time, the industry questioned whether amapiano would last. Artists wondered whether committing fully to the genre was a risk.
“It has always been on everyone’s mind that it is an amazing sound,” she admits. “But also it needs to be in you — How do you elevate and inject something to the sound that makes the sound last?”
Her answer was contribution.
“I feel like I was one of those people that gave the sound a subgenre when it comes to chants,” she says. “I just wanted to showcase myself.”
That instinct to showcase rather than shrink is evident in her latest release, Abafana Base Goli, a bold and striking single that brings together a powerful collective: DBN Gogo, Lady Du, Tman Express, Felo Le Tee, Fake’Well and Soul Jam.
The track is not just another collaboration; it is a candid anthem about men from Goli (Johannesburg) who love loudly but struggle with loyalty.
Through sharp storytelling and emotionally honest lyricism, Nobantu captures the excitement, charm and contradiction of being desired but not fully respected. It is a reality many women recognise immediately: the thrill of attention intertwined with the quiet understanding that affection does not always equal faithfulness.
“Abafana Base Goli is a candid song about men from a particular area who love women loudly but struggle with faithfulness.”
There is humour in the delivery but there is also truth. The song does not villainise; it observes. It acknowledges the charisma, the big gestures, the public displays and then gently exposes the cracks beneath them. In doing so, it becomes relatable rather than accusatory.
The collaboration reflects amapiano’s communal spirit. Rather than spotlighting one dominant figure, the record moves as a shared creative direction. DBN Gogo and Lady Du bring their established national presence, while Tman Express’s familiar vocal texture and Felo Le Tee’s production identity anchor the track in the sonic conversations shaping current charts.
Fake’Well and Soul Jam complete the line-up, reinforcing that this is less about individual ego and more about collective energy.
The origin of the single, however, mirrors the spontaneity that often defines her career.
“There was not a planned session,” she recalls of an earlier studio experience with DBN Gogo. “I did a couple of songs and when I was about to leave, they played that beat. I was like: ‘Hey, this is a nice beat.’ I started with the hook before I did the verse. I recorded alone. And then I left the song. I forgot about this song.”
Months later, hearing it played at a festival jolted her memory.
“I was so shocked that, oh my God, I did this song. I had forgotten about this song. And they were like: ‘We always play the song. The song is
too much.’”
That rediscovery shifted her perspective, not only about that track but about holding music back in general.
“You know what’s funny? It’s not even me taking my time,” she admits about her release pace. “It’s me being scared of dropping.”
Fear of oversaturation. Fear of numbers not aligning. Fear of momentum stalling.
But the organic growth of her recent releases has reassured her.
“It wasn’t a TikTok song,” she says. “It never trended. I was very scared about what the numbers were going to be like when it dropped. But it’s just moving on its own organically.”
That organic movement, streams climbing and listeners multiplying has pushed her into a new mindset.
“I just don’t wanna lock my music anymore and keep music in the vault,” she says. “If you have something dope, drop it right now when it’s hot.”
Stepping confidently into what she describes as her solo era, Nobantu is expanding her sound and commanding stages across the continent.
Beyond the music, her image remains intentional. She credits her grandmother’s influence for her polished aesthetic.
“My grandmother was a fashion killer,” she says. “She made sure that when she stepped out of the house she was looking clean.”
That lesson became personal philosophy. “I don’t go to the wardrobe and look, look, look. I actually envision the outfit in my head … and it always comes out clean. I don’t want to have a bad-looking day. When someone sees me, I want them to remember me, my personality, my vibe and mostly the outfit.”
From that first chant in Vula Mlomo to the layered storytelling of Abafana Base Goli, what has remained constant is belief. Belief in her voice. Belief in her range. Belief that she belongs at the forefront of a genre that continues to shape global dance conversations.
Perhaps that’s what we heard back in 2021 without fully articulating it: not just a catchy chant echoing through taxis and clubs but the sound of a woman stepping into
her title long before the industry confirmed it.
What does it mean to remember a place you can no longer physically inhabit?
And what does it mean to map a journey that was never meant to be purely geographical in the first place?
For Cape Town artist Manyaku Mashilo, the questions are less theoretical than lived. Across her layered mixed-media paintings, drawings and collages, figures move, sometimes in procession, sometimes in quiet drift, through expansive, abstract terrains that feel at once terrestrial and celestial. Beyond travelling, they’re searching, returning, remembering.
Born in Limpopo in 1991, Mashilo has built a distinctive visual language rooted in spiritual identity, ancestry, community and belonging. Her work draws deeply from family archives, historical photography and community memory, yet the worlds she constructs feel speculative, even otherworldly.
The result is a practice that sits in the fertile space between documentation and dreaming, between what was and what might be.
Her recent body of work, Here I Saw My Ancestors First (2026), presented at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, offers perhaps one of her most distilled meditations yet on lineage, womanhood and spiritual inheritance.
When Mashilo approached the fair, her instinct was not to overwhelm but to refine.
“I chose to try and be very minimal,” she explains. The presentation ultimately comprised four or five large-scale works, a deliberate decision that speaks to how she understands narrative in painting.
“I personally believe that the narrative that I’m trying to tell, which is the story of my grandmother but also that kind of representation, should be experienced on a large scale,” she says.
Scale, for Mashilo, is memory made spatial. The expansiveness of her canvases mirrors the physical and emotional landscapes of her upbringing in Limpopo: wide church grounds, open rural horizons, the felt immensity of childhood environments.
Within the works, two visual registers often coexist. The first is figurative: women and girls emerge from layered colour fields, their presence calm but insistent. The second is cartographic: delicate linework ripples across the surface like topographical markings, suggesting mountains, rivers and migratory routes.
“I always try to include all the different kinds of my practice,” she notes. “One is very figurative … and then there’s another aspect of my work which has to do with map-
making and the mapping of these women migrating through these sort of liminal spaces.”
The contour-like markings do more than structure the composition. They position Mashilo as a kind of spiritual cartographer, charting movements that are emotional, historical and metaphysical all at once.
Mashilo’s figures are never invented in isolation. They emerge from a dense personal and collective archive she has been building
for years.
“There’s two kinds of figures that I work with,” she explains. One draws from contemporary imagery like friends, self-portraits and photographs she has taken herself. The other comes from a carefully gathered visual repository: historical photographs, family albums and the work of black South African photojournalists.
She speaks with particular admiration for photographers like Santu Mofokeng and Peter Magubane, whose images documented black life under and beyond apartheid. What interests her, however, is not the violence that often frames the archives in public memory.
“The history that frequents our eyes the most are some of the violent images,” she says. “But when I look at some of those images I see a different story and I have different memories.”
One recurring reference point is the visual rhythm of mass baptisms, lines of worshippers in white garments moving toward water. Where documentary photography might emphasise sociopolitical context, Mashilo sees something else: choreography, spirituality, quiet collectivity.
“I just thought it looked really magical,” she recalls.
The act of re-seeing is central to her practice. Images travel: from lived moment to photograph, from photograph to archive, from archive to canvas. Each stage adds distance but also possibility.
“I like that it has travelled so long,” she says of the images she repurposes. “Then we can speak about this place where they’re going.”
Movement is everywhere in Mashilo’s work. Figures rarely appear static; they are almost always in transition, suspended between departure and arrival.
The roots of the motif lie partly in her childhood experiences within the Zion Christian Church, where annual Easter pilgrimages left a deep visual imprint.
“Every Easter you watch queues and queues of people heading to this mountain,” she recalls. What stayed with her was the collective belief that movement itself could be healing.
“I thought that was something that I carry with me every day,” she says.
In her paintings, the destination is often ambiguous. The women are “heading to a place that is not necessarily a physical destination but a metaphor for a place that is able to hold them”.
The ambiguity opens the work outward. Migration becomes multivalent: rural to urban, earthly to spiritual, historical to speculative. It also resonates across the African diaspora, something Mashilo has observed in the reception of her work abroad.
Audiences from Caribbean backgrounds, in particular, often recognise familiar visual cues: uniforms, colour palettes, ritual formations.
“It tells me that there’s a way that black people are connected across the globe,” she reflects.
“Our symbols and the way that we’ve had to build our communities are very tied together.”
If movement structures Mashilo’s work, spirituality animates it.
Her childhood memories of church are filled with sensory intensity: brass bands, choral repetition, the percussive footwork of her people’s musical traditions.
The experiences produced what she describes as an “otherworldly feeling”, a sense that the visible world was only part of the story.
“The repetition of song and the repetition of footwork, those things speak to the way that I understand spirituality,” she explains.
The sensibility extends beyond the church interior into the night skies of Limpopo, where the stars felt unusually close. “When you think about how vast the sky is at night, the stars in Limpopo in the evening feel like they look closer than when you’re in the city,” she says.
In her work, celestial space and terrestrial landscape often collapse into one another. Constellations, moons and atmospheric washes of colour suggest what she describes as an “astral landscape”, a realm where ancestors reside and from which knowledge flows.
Layered reds and ochres in Here I Saw My Ancestors First deepen the cosmological register. Portraits become vessels: for memory, for ritual, for passage.
At the emotional core of Mashilo’s practice are her grandmothers, figures whose creative and spiritual labour shaped not only her worldview but that of her siblings, many of whom are also artists.
“We grew up watching our grandmothers literally make something out of nothing,” she says.
On her father’s side, her grandmother was a farmer who gathered women in her yard to harvest, paint houses and repair what needed fixing. On her mother’s side, her grandmother was a healer who worked primarily with children and read natural phenomena such as the moon and the shadows as sources of knowledge.
The memories surface repeatedly in Mashilo’s imagery: geometric patterning reminiscent of decorated homes, communal female groupings, chromatic palettes drawn from rural environments.
“I don’t think it was a surprise that we all became artists,” she reflects. “Every holiday we were with our grandmothers: incredibly creative, incredibly knowledgeable women.”
In Here I Saw My Ancestors First, she explicitly references both grandmothers, positioning them as spiritual anchors within the work’s visual and conceptual language.
If Mashilo’s work teaches us anything, it is that movement does not always signal restlessness. Sometimes it is the most faithful form of remembering.
Her figures keep walking, across canvas, across history, across the thin veil between the visible and the felt, carrying with them the knowledge systems of the women who came before.
In tracing their paths, Mashilo is not only mapping where they have been. She is sketching, with remarkable tenderness, where they might go.
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