The maintenance of public infrastructure in South Africa is undervalued and the country has not yet planned strategically how to deal with the maintenance of its asset base.

This was highlighted by State-owned development finance institution Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) knowledge management and innovation unit manager Dr Zwelakhe Tshandu at a recent infrastructure dialogue under the theme ‘Maintenance of Public Infrastructure: How to master the art of taming contradictory forces’.

It was noted that the poor maintenance of public infrastructure assets shortened their useful lives, precipitated faults, hastened breakdowns, undermined service delivery and increased the backlogs with regard to accessing amenities, while well-maintained infrastructure served consumer needs and underpinned economic production and, subsequently, employment, taxes and rates.

City of Cape Town technical strategic support manager in the utilities service directorate Barry Coetzee highlighted in his address that it was important for a municipality to get the infrastructure supply and demand balance right, while creating, repairing and maintaining the infrastructure.

He also noted that the infrastructure needed to be delivered timeously to adequately provide for community members within the municipality, provided there was finance available to do this.

However, fulfilling this mandate was chal- lenging, as populations within the municipalities were increasing too fast, said Coetzee.

He pointed out that the most common challenges preventing a municipality from fulfilling its mandate were rapid urbanisation, changes to funding, the inability to raise loan funding, silo-based national policies, overemphasis on compliance, the misalign- ment of budgets and changes to resource supply.

Meanwhile, Absa Capital public–private partnership (PPP) financing specialist Andre Kruger highlighted at the event that the adoption of long-term capital planning and asset management plans, as well as applying alternative procurement for service delivery models, was a way of ensuring good maintenance of public infrastructure.

He stressed that while not all service delivery in a municipality should occur using PPP models, some municipalities could use this model.

The long-term PPP model of alternative procurement for service delivery entailed appointing a turnkey service delivery provider, as opposed to appointing several different smaller contractors.

Kruger said that some municipalities were still outsourcing short-term service contracts, as opposed to outsourcing long-term alternative procurement service delivery contracts, rendering the municipality inefficient in its service delivery.

DBSA M2/M3 sector South African financing manager Charles Mvungi and National Treasury local government pro- cess director Steven Kenyon were also present at the dialogue. Both acknowledged that financing and funding were actually not the biggest constraints with regard to infrastruc-ture maintenance for municipalities.

Kenyon noted that the regulation and the operation of the infrastructure were the con-straining factors.

Mvungi noted that there was sufficient money, skills and management capacity in terms of developing new infrastructure, but that skills and management were lacking in terms of maintaining infrastructure, which required a different skills set.

“There is evidence of a mismatch between the maintenance requirements and the resources deployed to deal with this. “For example, municipalities fail to timely respond to stress calls.”

Other factors, such as preventive mainte-nance being deferred, budgets being diverted to more pressing, recurrent expenditure and the failure to embed integrated systems for asset management, also influenced the regulation and operation of infrastructure.

It was noted that adequate spending on the maintenance of assets would protect the investment already made in infrastructure and it helped to sustain service delivery for the people living in a particular municipality.

Mvungi pointed out that funding was focused on acquiring new infrastructure, instead of properly maintaining existing infrastructure.

Findings from the dialogue indicated that poor behaviour and attitude, as well as a lack of technical maintenance skills, were the biggest drivers of poor infrastructure maintenance – not insufficient financing and funding.

It was suggested that, in the short-term, alternative models of service delivery should be used to maintain infrastructure while South Africa focused on improving skills training in infrastructure maintenance.

Also, infrastructure maintenance guides should be created and provided for munici-palities.

It was also noted that infrastructure mainte-nance knowledge and solutions should be shared throughout the country to the benefit of all South African municipalities.

The infrastructure dialogues aim to stimu-late discussions on infrastructure issues and to create a high-level platform for knowledge sharing on infrastructure views between government, the private sector and civil society stakeholders in the sector.

The dialogues are jointly hosted by the DBSA, the South African Cities Network, the National Business Initiative and the Performance Monitoring and Evaluation Department in the Presidency.