Maintaining infrastructure is vital

DEAR SIR — I thoroughly enjoyed the feature, To the rescue of Kariba Dam (February 17). This important regional story underlined quite simply the dire need for sustained infrastructure maintenance in developing countries. African governments can no longer blame their crises on their colonial legacies.

I believe SA should take a lesson from the dam’s dire state and make every effort to keep our national infrastructure assets in a better state of repair. In the midst of SA’s power crisis, it would be irresponsible to ignore the looming collapse of one of sub-Saharan Africa’s greatest hydropower producers.

In his book, The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier outlines four development traps that have a serious effect on the socioeconomic stability and prospects of developing nations.

One of them is the crippling effect of being landlocked with a bad neighbour who is unwilling or unable to cooperate to achieve mutual gain. It is thus unfortunate that Zambia now has to assume full responsibility for the emergency funding package being afforded to the Zambezi River Authority by the international community as a result of Zimbabwe’s limitation to only concessional funding as a result of previous defaults.

Perhaps this is just as well, given the well-versed, pan-Africanist, antiwestern development political narrative of Zimbabwe President Mugabe (pictured), which is all too often an excuse for his government’s failure to achieve results.

The present state of the Kariba Dam, of which the Zambian and Zimbabwean governments share in mutual benefit and thus should share in mutual responsibility, underscores the very real effect the financial standing and fiscal ability of a given government to maintain strategic national assets has on the sustainability potential of regional blocs.

It is high time that many African governments come to understand the devastating consequences that a lack of forward planning and maintenance can have, not only on their people, but on their neighbours’ growth prospects too.

That said, I sincerely hope that the 3-million villagers who have potentially been saved by yet another global development bank bail-out are bracing to breathe a sigh of relief.