One factor contributing to the devastation caused by the recent floods in KwaZulu-Natal is neglect of maintenance of infrastructure by municipalities.
Other than ensuring that infrastructure continues to operate efficiently, keeping to a maintenance regimen can make it easy for a municipality to keep track of which infrastructure is vulnerable to flooding. Poorly maintained infrastructure is easily swept away by floods.
The effects of climate change and the long shadow of spatial planning explain a lot. To change these two factors will take a long time and cost hundreds of billions of rand. Climate change calls for far more radical changes, including rethinking land use and the design and building of infrastructure to withstand the worst of weather.
In the interim, paying more attention to infrastructure maintenance will at least let municipalities know which infrastructure is vulnerable to climate change.
But municipalities are notorious for neglecting maintenance. Infrastructure maintenance offers politicians lean pickings for looting. It also offers no ribbon-cutting opportunities. Politicians thrive on the limelight. Opening a new sewage plant is a media opportunity Applications will come thick and fast and have to ‘run their course’ but its maintenance is not.
The Treasury has for many years exhorted municipalities to pay greater attention to the maintenance of infrastructure, without much success.
“In the long run the cost to the entity in terms of lost economic benefits or backlog in service delivery will exceed the perceived ‘saving’ in maintenance costs,” the Treasury said in a 2008 guideline on local government capital asset management.
A planned approach to maintenance would ensure that maintenance, including routine inspection and servicing of assets, would be done “in a manner which minimises disruption to the users of the asset and ensures that maintenance resources are used in the most cost-effective manner”.
The Treasury has been telling municipalities that maintenance of their infrastructure, the replacement value of which is estimated at billions of rand, is important as it costs more to replace an asset than to keep an existing one in good working condition.
But it seems the Treasury’s message had a perverse effect on politicians, confirming that they should rather wait for infrastructure to collapse because of the richer pickings when it is repaired or replaced.
In the 2008 guideline document on capital asset management, the Treasury said municipalities are guardians of hundreds of billions of rand in public assets, whose true total value is still being determined.
“We must therefore acknowledge the magnitude of the challenge facing municipalities in providing and managing public assets in a sustainable manner. As municipalities embrace the challenge to address infrastructure backlogs and the expansion of capital works, they must also maintain or renew existing assets. Maintenance is critical as it will always cost more — much more — to replace an asset which is not properly maintained.”
The guidelines explained that the management of public assets involves the maintenance and renewal of existing assets as well as adding new assets “in a sustainable and affordable manner”.
“Sustainable asset management requires a municipality to take a holistic approach by understanding the future cost and service consequences of its assets and matching these against revenues — problems arise when only current costs and revenues are matched.”
The Treasury said that spending a rand on a new asset would, on average, add 10c to all subsequent maintenance, operations and renewal budgets, money that must be budgeted for and raised through rates and taxes and other municipal revenue.
But municipalities lacked reliable data on municipal assets and their values, creating a problem even for those inclined to do maintenance. The Treasury said lack of adequate asset registers was a common cause of municipal audit qualifications.
“Although some municipalities have initiated projects to develop asset registers, the information is still generally unreliable and does not fully comply with the accounting standards and are thus subject to audit queries and qualification. In addition, there have been inconsistencies in the approach taken during early implementation, resulting in extremely high costs being incurred in establishing asset registers and systems,” said the Treasury.
And the problem continues. The auditor-general’s 2019/2020 municipal audit report noted “material errors” in Tshwane’s accounts, despite the municipality paying consultants R198m (R213m) to verify and correct its fixed-assets register.
Getting a handle on infrastructure and other public assets is the first step towards their maintenance. Municipalities must first know what assets they have as well as their rand values before they can think about their maintenance, let alone how to make them resilient to the effects of climate change.
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
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