Shaky walls a threat to SA’s entire edifice
• Poorly maintained and deteriorating infrastructure could be a powder keg in an already perilous climate
State-owned infrastructure, perhaps better described as public capital, is the framework for everything South Africans do collectively. It belongs to citizens. They paid for it. They need it.
It is a means of production. It is the material manifestation of the social compact. The goods, services and systems are the roof, walls and foundation of SA’s house.
It is for these reasons that the South African Institute of Civil Engineers 2017 report card for SA is so worrying. The institute awarded the country’s public infrastructure an overall D+ on a scale of A to E in which A is world-class and E means unfit for purpose.
The institute’s greatest concern is a lack of maintenance of public assets, which it says is due to inconsistent and deficient political leadership and a lack of planning capability and technical capacity.
Over the past 20 years, the government has spent more than R2.5-trillion on infrastructure — an average of 6% of GDP. SA’s economic slowdown, however, called for fiscal consolidation and a cut in infrastructure spending as a percentage of GDP, says the report.
This is corroborated by a statement in the 2017 Budget Review by former Treasury director-general Lungisa Fuzile, that the balance sheets of several state entities with extensive responsibilities for infrastructure were “now stretched to their limits”.
While the D+ means SA’s infrastructure is less than satisfactory, though not entirely derelict, it is an aggregate score.
In this sense, it does not rate its D- score for bulk water resources as any better or worse than its D- score for the category “other paved municipal roads” because local conditions will determine local priorities.
In Cape Town, for example, where the water shortage has become acute, residents are likely to attach less meaning to the score for roads than they would have a few years ago.
It is equally clear, though, that it would be inappropriate to view the condition of any public asset in isolation. Infrastructure is a system in which a deficiency in any one part degrades the state’s function in its entirety.
A good example is how the institute’s high score for heavyhaul rail freight lines (B+) is meaningless to bulk grain producers, who need branch lines (D-) to reach mills and markets in urban centres.
The consequence is that farm-gate bulk grain is shipped by road, which further degrades municipal and provincial roads (already scored C- and D, respectively) where the South African National Road Agency’s infrastructure contribution (B) is irrelevant. This, in turn, impairs just about all other local economic activities including the delivery of basic services.
The social consequences are all too evident in the contiguous service delivery protests in poorer communities across the country. In the Vaal Triangle, for instance, the chain of consequences set off by a 15-year delay in infrastructure development and maintenance has brought the district economy to a virtual standstill.
This, says Prof Danie Meyer, an expert on local economic development at North-West University, originates from poor communication between the DA-controlled Midvaal local municipality and Gauteng’s provincial ANC government. In the latest development in the district, residents of the Sicelo township dug a trench across a part of the R59 highway that links Johannesburg with the Vaal Triangle.
The immediate consequence has been heavy traffic delays and road freight being diverted, which in turn has severely damaged about 20km of local roads. Meyer estimates the repairs to cost R500,000 per kilometre, or a total cost of R10m at a rate of R100,000 a day.
The knock-on effect continues. When the Midvaal police realised they could no longer cope with the protesting, Johannesburg’s Red Ants unit was summoned at a rate of about R20,000 per day.
Add the indirect consequence of the road closure affecting about 36,000 vehicles and 72,000 commuters each day and about R18m is lost to the economy daily, says Meyer.
This amounts to about R125m a week, or R500m a month, not accounting for the costs linking this industrial hub to other elements of the national economy.
The institute highlights vandalism and theft as part of what degrades public assets, but although protests are mostly illegal and often result in crime, it would be facile to blame citizens for the parlous state of the country’s infrastructure. Rather, it should be seen as an inevitable iteration of a system in chaos.
A similar chain of events began in October 1986 in which a collusion of several apparently small factors led to infrastructure degradation.
That was when the railway police were incorporated into the South African Police, a government decision that exposed unpoliced and relatively underused branch railway lines to theft and vandalism, rendering many of them unsafe.
It meant it had become too expensive to ship farm goods. Agribusiness, among others, then lobbied for greater liberalisation of freight transport.
They got their way in 1990, when the road freight transport permit system was abolished, allowing road freight to compete for agribusiness.
A study by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the University of Pretoria shows that vehicle repair and maintenance costs are about 30% higher on fair roads, compared with good roads and about 60% higher on poor roads.
The roads began collapsing quicker than local authorities could maintain them and, as in the Vaal Triangle, this had a negative effect on other sectors of the economy and society.
It is likely the branch-line disaster could not have been foreseen, but the conditions of social discontent that now prevail have long been known.
It is possible even to argue that discontent over racially exclusive access to infrastructure is the social engine that drove the demise of apartheid.
Prof Anthony Turton, a political scientist and water expert with experience in national security, first raised the alarm about the possibility of violent protests in 2006.
He subsequently wrote a paper about the dangers of this, but he was stopped by the CSIR from presenting it at a conference in 2008 under the auspices of the CSIR —which then suspended him.
Responding to the report by the engineering institute, he says since then the number of violent protests has grown exactly in the way he predicted.
“In my professional opinion, we are sitting on a powder keg, waiting for it to explode,” he says. “The drivers of anger are many and varied, with service delivery being but one.”
Turton says this is evident in the increase in political assassinations, irreversible job losses, an investment freeze because of the country’s sovereign debt downgrades and the unresolved ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism.
To this Turton adds what he calls the constant erosion of the country’s engineering profession by allocating resources to political allies Cuba and China, and the “advanced state of decay of all infrastructure”.
And so the consequences pile up.
In response to the institute’s report, industry body Consulting Engineers SA says the viability and continued existence of consulting engineers as a profession is at risk because the flow of infrastructure projects has all but dried up.
CEO Chris Campbell says that without sufficient work, the “firms are becoming unsustainable and cannot afford to retain the highly skilled and experienced engineers necessary to ensure growth in SA”.
This means that even when SA manages to scrape together the political and financial wherewithal, the country may no longer have the skills or time to reverse the march towards infrastructure collapse.
It may be a relief that SA’s public assets are not yet at a state of imminent catastrophic collapse, to paraphrase institute CEO Manglin Pillay, but at a mere three notches above an E rating, we are perilously close.
The Department of Economic Development had not responded to questions about the report at the time of publication.
THE DRIVERS OF ANGER ARE MANY AND VARIED, WITH SERVICE DELIVER BEING BUT ONE