The Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA), already decimated by years of procurement fraud and state capture, discovered another layer of institutional rot in 2019: more than a thousand people on its payroll who either did not exist or were not working.
**Project Ziveze: The Verification**
PRASA launched Project Ziveze — an internal employee verification programme — to establish how many of its employees were actually real people doing real work. The results were staggering: 1,277 ghost employees were identified on the payroll.
The agency was haemorrhaging approximately R20 million per month in fraudulent salary payments to people who did not show up for work, did not exist, or had long since stopped any involvement with PRASA.
**The Mass Resignation**
Perhaps the most telling detail: during the verification process, 1,159 employees resigned. They did not wait to be identified — they simply left. This mass exodus suggests that a significant portion of PRASA's workforce knew they were drawing salaries fraudulently and chose to flee rather than face verification.
Combined with the 1,277 formally identified ghost employees, the picture is of an organisation where thousands of payroll entries were either fictitious or fraudulent.
**The Savings**
The total savings from Project Ziveze were approximately R200 million — representing the salary payments that were stopped once ghost employees were identified and removed. At R20 million per month, this suggests the ghost worker problem had been running for approximately 10 months before the project produced results, though the underlying fraud likely stretched back years.
**The Accountability Gap**
SCOPA, the parliamentary watchdog, expressed public displeasure at the lack of criminal consequences. Despite identifying 1,277 ghost employees and watching 1,159 others flee, no criminal cases were immediately opened. The matter was referred to the Special Investigating Unit to "follow the money" — to trace where the fraudulent salary payments had actually gone and who had orchestrated the scheme.
As of 2026, no prosecutions arising from Project Ziveze have been publicly announced. R200 million was saved, but no one has been held accountable for creating the ghost employees in the first place.
**The Broader PRASA Context**
The ghost employees existed alongside — and were enabled by — the broader state capture of PRASA documented extensively by the Zondo Commission. An organisation where procurement was captured and oversight had collapsed was fertile ground for payroll fraud. Ghost workers were just another manifestation of the same institutional failure that produced the R80 billion locomotive procurement scandal and the collapse of commuter rail services across the country.