South Africa has allowed its infrastructure – the hard scaffolding of its economy – to decay over decades, and this has been a major contributor to the country’s inability to grow over the past twenty years. Unless this is reversed, and South Africa’s infrastructure networks are restored and upgraded, it will remain trapped in in this trajectory.

This is the message from the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), a Johannesburg-based think tank, which yesterday launched a report analysing the state of South Africa’s infrastructure and the implications for the economy, Reinforcing South Africa'sGrowthThroughInfrastructure . 

It argues that South Africa has been trapped in a damaging policy-infrastructure-growth loop since about 2008. Growth, at between 1% and 3% per annum over this period, has been a fraction of what is necessary to provide for the country, and well below that of comparable markets, which typically manage growth of between 4% and 5%. Income per person is now lower than it was 17 years ago, while many comparable economies have done the opposite. One element of this is the breakdown of the infrastructural assets that a modern economy needs to operate.

Examining the trajectory of key systems – water supply, transport and logistics, and electricity – it is apparent that the issue is not a resource problem, but one rooted in policy. South Africa’s infrastructure crises must be understood in relation to decisions that have been taken.

“Behind every dry tap and railway failure is a decision taken in an office. In this way, infrastructure failure is a growth problem, with a policy cause. The country has the capital and the expertise. What has been missing is the decision to let the people who can do the work get on with it, and to hold them to account when they don't,” said Anlu Keeve, IRR analyst and the author of the report.

South Africa’s infrastructure failures have been driven by an often-dogmatic commitment to state control and to excessive spending (through both preferential procurement requirements and corruption), a tolerance for mismanagement, and a disregard for the managerial and technical expertise that maintaining complex systems demands.

The paper argues that reversing the decline begins with restoring the basic disciplines on which functioning infrastructure depends: routine maintenance, monitoring, credible data, procurement discipline, and clear accountability.

It will also be necessary to bring in private sector capital and skills. For example, build-own-transfer public-private partnerships could be extremely useful in the transport sector. These would allow private companies to finance and construct infrastructure and assume the financial and construction risks. After completion and an agreed operational period, ownership would be transferred to the state at a predetermined price.

“The unglamorous work is what prevents the expensive failures,” Keeve said.

There is, fortunately, now greater receptivity on the part of the government to new, more flexible thinking about infrastructure, although there any many entrenched interests and a continuing ideological aversion to it. This means that constructive action on South Africa’s infrastructure demands hard choices. These are political issues, not just engineering ones.

As the report states: “Fixing South Africa’s water, electricity, rail, road, and port infrastructure must not be treated as merely a technical task that requires more money and expertise. It will require changing the rules that govern how decisions are made, who makes them, and on what grounds. Without that, no amount of capital or technical support will be sufficient.”

You can read the report here.