For most South Africans living in the country’s largest cities, the infrastructure backlogs are not only visible but painfully disruptive.

Driving without hitting a pothole has become a perilous art, as has navigating piecemeal water or electricity repairs where the resultant holes are left gaping for months, if not years. The stench of sewer leaks pollutes the air in many neighbourhoods, where water supply is also erratic and power cuts continue despite the official demise of loadshedding.

Given this poor state of affairs, residents and businesses are often only too grateful to see any visible sign of catch-up.

However, in a recent speech to the Sustainable Infrastructure Development Symposium South Africa, Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis correctly highlighted the pitfalls associated with a mentality where addressing backlogs was viewed as an end in itself.

Even the record R12.3-billion spent by the City of Cape Town on infrastructure last year, described as the biggest investment yet by a city-government in South Africa, was in his view the minimum level for a city experiencing ongoing urbanisation pressures. “Even at those record levels of investment, we are only just keeping pace with the rapid growth of our city,” he acknowledged.

As a “rule of thumb”, he postulated that yearly spending across the country’s major cities would have to rise to between R10-billion and R15-billion to match growth and prepare for the future needs of residents and businesses.

Yearly infrastructure budgets would also need to rise by at least the combination of inflation and the city’s population growth; an unofficial ‘budget rule’ that Hill-Lewis claimed to be enforcing.

He made no mention of climate resilience. This too will add necessary upward pressure on city infrastructure, but the longer-term benefits will dwarf the upfront costs.

Moving from a situation where even catch-up investment is not happening in many instances, to one where more climate-resilient infrastructure is built ahead of demand, is unlikely in the near term. Municipal finances are in a shambles, arguably epitomised by Johannesburg’s budget, described in a recent Centre for Development and Enterprise report as “self-evidently unsustainable”.

Apart from a political reckoning, which may arise in some cases in November, the list of things that need to change before infrastructure spend recovers includes everything from tackling embedded corruption networks and halting waste to implementing credible revenue-collection systems and hiring ethical and technically competent managers.

Unless things start to change soon, however, the prognosis for growth and development will remain weak.

One immediate catalyst could be the mobilisation of private resources and expertise, given that municipal and equitable-share resources alone will remain sorely insufficient for some time.

Here, too, the risks are significant, particularly in a context of extreme resource and skills asymmetry between the public and private actors.

Nevertheless, with proper design, procurement transparency and diligent oversight, there is surely some prospect for engineering and implementing projects that don’t fall prey to corruption and/or eventuate in ratepayer and taxpayer bailouts.