Lutsinga: Striking the right service delivery nerve through technology

Mamabolo cited among others massive inefficiency and corruption by service providers and some project managers, whose inept and crooked actions lead to “pouring government money into the drainage system; literally taking government money and running it into the drain instead of delivering infrastructure.”

He l a me n t e d t h e d i s t u r b i n g fact that “a massive percentage of money goes to waste and very little remains that impacts and touches living conditions of the people”.

Mamabolo doesn’t mince his words when confronting the scourge that has threatened to c r i p p l e h i s d e p a r t me n t ’ s c o r e mandate to deliver and maintain state infrastructure for the betterment of people’s lives.

“At the heart of it, it’s massive inefficiencies that make it possible for a number of syndicates to collude around taking money from government. People who run infrastructure, who deliver infrastructure run it in an environment I call ‘ black boxes’. These black boxes are spaces that are only known by them and nobody else,” said Mamabolo. “Project managers and service providers: they work in dark corners. They work in sealed black boxes and there is no transparency. We have got to address the inefficiencies and delivery of infrastructure. We have to change the delivery value chain of infrastructure. [That is why] I said we need to bring [in new] technology.”

Hence Lutsinga was born and now forms a central part of operations at GDID.

“If you are driving any serious service delivery or any programme that is supposed to give you results and you don’t have dashboards, you will never see what you are doing,” argued Mamabolo.

Through the dashboards at Lutsinga Infrastructure House, Mamabolo and his team can monitor the progress of each project, see the number of projects lagging behind and those nearing completion or totally complete.

Unlike in the past where the wheels of government bureaucracy dragged ever slower in a bid to bring slackers to account, through the dashboards accountability has become a rapid and much more interactive process.

Mamabolo explained that the importance of infrastructure in changing the performance of the economy is a case already made, but the inefficient and ineffec - tive management of the budget is the big problem hampering development.

“Running infrastructure at a cost that is dodgy, rising costs, quality of output very poor, contractors doing messy work, the time it takes to complete projects and impact people is very poor. We are not doing well on those,” he said.

But Mamabolo is taking the fight against such problems head on.

“We need to make sure every rand touches lives. If we don’t do that we will run down this country by allowing people to run government money into the drain.”