Municipal underspending and training require fixing {writer: Piet Coetzer}

If South Africa is to come to grips with the debilitating problem of inadequate service delivery at particularly municipal and provincial government levels, greater urgency needs to be injected into the debate on and declared intentions to establish a more professional and depoliticised civil service corps.

A global survey on infrastructure for financial services firm KPMG International, has found that better training of public sector officials to improve infrastructure delivery was cited by 73% of respondents from Africa. Globally, the percentage was 37%.

In addition, 55% of African respondents called for increased use of performance-based measures, against 25% globally.

Certain municipalities are badly underspending on infrastructure repairs and maintenance.

The average spend by metros on repairs and maintenance is only 5% of adopted budgets. Johannesburg was at only 1.8% – triggering the National Treasury to express its concern in its medium-term revenue and expenditure framework last year.

These concerns are particularly important in light of the announcement by Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan in his Budget Speech that the government plans to accelerate its infrastructure renewal programme.

Despite the end of the massive construction programme for the World Cup, the three-year rolling budget for infrastructure had increased from R787 billion last year to R846bn from 2020 to 2013.

But it does not seem to be merely a matter of spending or making available sufficient money.

Working in professional positions in the government should become a career and not be generally only a case of short-term contractual appointments. This was one of the main messages from the recent annual media breakfast of the Consulting Engineers South Africa (Cesa).

Other sources reported that the country is heading for a number of serious infrastructure-related crises. In Cape Town, pollution of rivers and waterways is threatening the Blue Flag status of some of its beaches.

Cesa president Zulch Lötter said his organisation, representing 450 affiliated firms employing some 20 000 engineers, strongly supported the debates and discussions that were starting to take place about the political employment of senior staff and the creation of a depoliticised professional officialdom that served the government of the day with integrity. “The single biggest task is to get experienced staff and some permanence into the these senior positions,” he said.

Cesa deputy president Naren Bhojaram said that historically, the municipal engineer was a very highly regarded and respected member of the government who had a lifetime career and a 20- to 30-year outlook. However, most municipal engineers now were given only five-year contracts.

The way in which the government had structured senior positions in local government and the respect given to these positions meant “no matter how much you pay them, nobody wants to do the job,” said Bhojaram.

The number of engineers employed by the government has reduced by nearly two-thirds, while the population served has increased almost four-fold.

Lötter said that before 1994, 5 100 engineers served 14 million people outside the former homelands. Today, an estimated 1 800 engineers serve almost 47 million people.

The lack of technical management expertise, particularly in municipal and provincial government departments, is likely to be the single greatest stumbling block to sustainable development and growth, he said.

While the number of professional engineers in the public sector has fallen to around 15% from 40% in 1980, this decline was counter to the overall picture in the country. There has been an increase from 12 000 to 20 000 in the professional ranks of Cesa’s member firms.

Cesa, however, continued to assess that there were serious shortages of engineers, despite a strong growth in the number of university intakes and a steady growth in the number of professional engineers being registered.

Bhojaram stressed that the solution for the government did not lie in a mass employment campaign, noting that it required only a small cadre of engineers to ensure delivery.

“The South African National Roads Agency runs an institution of 169 employees, and if you look at what they execute in terms of projects, it is an enormous amount of work, which is done extremely well because they have good procurement and partnership arrangements in place,” he said.

Among the crisis areas that were highlighted are:

• Major assets could be lost entirely, should the maintenance backlogs not be closed, indicating that the management of such assets requires a major overhaul. It costs R175 00 a kilometre to resurface a road compared to R3 million to rebuild when it has gone to potholes. Similar scenarios held true for other infrastructure types found in energy, water and logistics milieus.

• South Africa’s water demand is projected to exceed supply by 2025, with metropolitan areas such as the Witwatersrand to experience shortages from 2013. Water quality is deteriorating and interventions are required to build, maintain and upgrade infrastructure and upskill staff.

• In the wake of the recession, the government’s target of a R787-billion infrastructure investment programme covering energy, water and transport now could be met only if the government were willing to take on additional debt – but for the market to lend to the country, without affecting its risk rating, it is vital that it shows credible control with effective management of infrastructure investment.

Metro examples

Elsewhere, at least 80 staff vacancies in highly skilled posts at the City of Cape Town’s utilities department – particularly in the waste water section – have been blamed for high E. coli counts and chronic water pollution at several city beaches. Waterways and rivers are being polluted by the waste water plant in the Cape Flats area.