It's all falling apart: Engineers' infrastructure warning to government

Infrastructure maintenance has been on the slide for the last dozen years – and it is not getting any better.

This was the solemn warning on Monday from Kevin Wall‚ who was the lead researcher in the 2006‚ 2011 and 2017 South African Institution of Civil Engineering infrastructure report cards.

Speaking at the Water Institute of Southern Africa conference in Cape Town‚ Wall said: “We cannot afford to build only to permit decay. We want to move from a situation of ‘patch and pray’ to one of ‘find and fix’. Maintenance is crucial.”

He said a combination of limited resources‚ public sector restructuring‚ inefficiency‚ skill shortages and “less than optimum governance”‚ had led to “extreme pressure on the condition of the public infrastructure asset base”.

Wall added: “It is of concern that the water and sanitation fixed infrastructure of the country appears to be stuck in a condition that is at best ‘satisfactory for now’... to ‘at worst‚ unfit for purpose’.

“But it is mostly at risk of failure‚ [where the] infrastructure is not coping with demand and is poorly maintained. It is likely that the public will be subjected to severe inconvenience and even danger without prompt action.”

Wall said one of the main motivations for preparing the report cards was to lobby the government to focus on the importance of maintaining infrastructure.

“The current replacement cost of [government] infrastructure‚ excluding that owned by state-owned enterprises‚ is immense. The replacement cost of water and sanitation infrastructure alone would be of the order of R1‚400-billion – or half of national GDP‚” he said.

“If the government spends its maintenance budget on fixing infrastructure only after it has already broken down‚ then it’s effectively throwing away a large proportion of that budget‚ funds that could rather have been used elsewhere. If infrastructure is not looked after‚ the people who suffer the most are the poor.”

- Supplied by Water Institute of Southern Africa