While good strides have been made since 1994 to reduce the national service delivery backlog, particularly in the water and sanitation sector, inherent institutional flaws at municipal, provincial and national level are the greatest inhibitors in the drive to provide basic services and infrastructure to rural South Africa and to maintain and refurbish existing infrastructure in developed areas.

“The institutional approach to service delivery of the last few decades is still our biggest failure,” conceded South African Local Government Organisation (Salga) municipal services executive director Mthobeli Kolisa at an infrastructure dialogue organised by the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) in December.

Central to community discontent was the failure to adequately deliver water and sanitation services, despite the reduction of the sanitation backlog from 52% in 1994 to 21% in 2010.

This was largely due to the continuous deterioration of bulk sanitation infrastructure, as a result of inadequate maintenance and upgrade and the growth of informal settlements in urban areas, making the achievement of the 2014 goal of national access to sanitation services unlikely.

“We need to scrutinise our institutional reality by regarding these services as a basic human right and by reconfiguring our institutional arrangements to reflect this,” explained Department of Perform- ance Monitoring and Evaluation in the Presidency deputy director-general Hassen Mohammed.

He added that inadequate and inflex- ible existing funding arrangements and mechanisms during the institutional planning process were considerable inhibitors to real development and did not allow for possible trade-offs.

“This results in a situation where it is either/or, and does not enable us, for example, to prioritise the provision of roads over sanitation or vice versa. As a result, the ‘easier’ projects are often prioritised,” he said candidly.

The Presidency reported that round 11%, or 1.4-million households, had yet to be provided with sanitation services, while at least 26%, or 3.2-million households, in formal areas had sanitation services that did not meet the minimum standards, owing to the deterioration of infrastructure caused by a lack of technical capacity, maintenance, refurbishment or insufficient water resources.

Kolisa added that government had not explored sustainable and alternative service-provision options, with most municipalities currently unable to provide any form of basic services to communities, owing to their evolution to a total reliance on the skills of the private sector.

“Over time, the approach that has been adopted at municipal level is one where services do not need to be provided by the municipality itself, but, instead, can be contracted out. This has led to an asymmetry between the technical capacity of the public and private sectors, as most technical skills have migrated to industry,” he noted.

A further aggravator of service delivery backlogs was that decisions surrounding the prioritisation of services were taken at national, provincial or municipal level, rather than following thorough consultations with civil society, which resulted in community dissatisfaction and blunted government’s capacity as an institution of transformation.

“If national and local government are to be bodies of transformation, they need additional capacity and the popular support of local communities,” Kolisa said.

Critical to improved service delivery across all sectors was the creation of improved implementation and coordination structures that would align key role-players or service delivery management structures in each sector.

These structures would prepare a pipeline of costed projects to address the household-level facility backlogs and capital and maintenance backlogs evident in each municipality within a clear timeframe and with the necessary funding coordination.

In 2011, the DBSA was appointed by the Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Commission as the principal implementing agent responsible for assisting the 23 most underresourced South African municipali- ties to address maintenance backlogs and upgrades required in water, electricity and bulk sanitation infrastructure.

DBSA divisional executive Bethuel Netshiswinzhe said the organisation was investigating innovative approaches that had not yet been considered in its drive to address these service delivery challenges, following its observation of a historical lack of adequate project planning and implementation by government.