GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The unfathomable depth of SA’s bankruptcy

In a land of startling figures, some startling figures have been doing the rounds of late. The auditor-general says irregular expenditure among South Africa’s 257 municipalities has jumped to R28bn. That’s big.

Then again, it’s also not that big. After all, it’s only half of what SARS last estimated the tax revenue shortfall to be: R50bn. That’s bigger, although that, in turn, is actually only half of the amount Pravin Gordhan conservatively estimates "state capture" cost the country — a whopping R100bn.

R100bn is really big, no question. There are few R100bn numbers out there. "Nenegate", for example, is estimated to have cost the Public Investment Corporation R100bn; others say R500bn. A fair whack went missing one way or the other.

That’s money gone through political incompetence and economic uncertainty. But there are other ways for money to vanish and even bigger sums. In 2014, for example, Fin24 estimated SA’s banks had "written off or made provisions to write off debt of more than R100bn over the last 12 months." That was four years ago; you do the maths.

In fact, look at almost any element of the South African state, and like those social media videos that slowly and steadily scale the earth to a galactic super, ultramega sun burning away somewhere out there in space — one that makes the earth look like a grain of sand next to Table Mountain — and you quickly realise that there is no bottom to the hole we are in.

It goes down and down, forever. As you descend, the numbers become fantastical.

Let’s take water, by way of illustration.

Big: Last year it was estimated that Johannesburg needed R16bn to address its water infrastructure backlog. That sounds like a lot, right? Wrong.

Bigger: Umgeni Water, the water board that serves KwaZulu-Natal, was estimated in 2017 to need R200bn to address its own infrastructure backlog. According to one study, "R121bn was needed to build bulk water infrastructure, including dams, water-purification plants and pipelines, and a further R100bon for reticulation".

Even bigger: Now consider that there are 12 water boards in SA. Comprehensive studies haven’t even been done on the kinds of backlogs they are facing or the combined cost.

Even bigger still: Here is a paragraph from the Department of Water and Sanitation’s January 2018 master plan:

"Approximately 56% of the over 1,150 municipal waste-water treatment works and approximately 44% of the 962 water treatment works in the country are in a poor or critical condition and in need of urgent rehabilitation. Some 11% of this infrastructure is completely dysfunctional."

The department didn’t bother to put a cost to that. What would the point be? Too many zeroes.

Infinity and beyond: Add all that up, if you can — which you can’t — and it’s some monumental cost, probably in the trillions. But really, it’s an imaginary number. Because you can’t wrap your head around it.

The truth is, the state doesn’t even bother to provide a consolidated figure for the total backlog facing SA’s water infrastructure, plants and equipment. A calculator hasn’t been built with a big enough screen for that number. Instead, it plays a game. We all do; it’s how we cope — a figure from one entity there, another from a different department here, one from a metro, another from a province. And so on.

We can sort of just digest those individual numbers. Sort of. Were one to consolidate them all, we would have an instantaneous and collective heart attack.

Bloomberg reported in a story on Umgeni Water’s condition that "The Treasury estimated R132bn in spending on water and sanitation infrastructure in the three years to March 2019".

One hundred and thirty-two billion rand over three years. You could fix two-thirds of one water board out of 12 with that. Good effort.

The department of water’s slogan, proudly displayed on the front of its master plan document reads as follows: Ready for the future and ahead of the curve — let’s do it!

Well, hardly. But when faced with a crisis of this size, unregulated optimism is probably the best course of action. This is where things start to get really scary. That’s is just water. You can play the same game with SA’s roads.

Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba says: "Spiralling infrastructure backlogs caused by years of ANC inaction have been allowed to develop into a monstrous R170bn backlog over 10 years."

Just for Johannesburg, R170bn. The metro has 3,900km of surfaced roads in "poor condition". SA, on the other hand, has a total 785,000km worth of roads (of which about 158,000km are paved). Just 22,000km of those paved roads are managed nationally. But there are also the roughly 47,000km managed by provinces, the 51,000km managed by metros and the 37,000km managed by municipalities.

With regard to the national component, in January 2017, former transport minister Dipuo Peters said there was an infrastructure backlog amounting to almost R200bn.

So there are two numbers, a local and national figure, to dwell upon. The total is R370bn.

Not every province tries to calculate these things: KwaZulu-Natal did in December, at least with regard to potholes.

"KwaZulu-Natal’s department of transport meanwhile admitted to The Witness that it has a ‘huge’ backlog in addressing the pothole problem, adding that two years ago it had learnt that it had an R80bn backlog in fixing potholes," the Natal Witness reported.

This quote from KwaZulu-Natal department of transport spokesperson Nathi Sukazi just about says it all: "With our budget of about R7bn a year, about half goes toward maintenance and new roads. The road network in KwaZulu-Natal has about 8,300km of tarred road surface. This includes provincial roads and roads under municipalities. So, we have to attend to a huge backlog on tarred roads, and this is before we even talk about [maintenance to] gravel roads and pedestrian and vehicle bridges."

Total: R450bn. Let’s see if we can add to that.

In March, the Roads Agency Limpopo (RAL) said the following: "For the 2018-19 financial year, RAL has been allocated a budget of R988.9m by the Limpopo department of public works, roads and infrastructure for operational costs, and upgrading and maintenance of roads. To put it into context, at current estimates, RAL will need R160bn to upgrade and maintain the entire road network in Limpopo."

Total: R610bn.

The Eastern Cape’s road infrastructure backlog is estimated to be at least R100bn.

Total: R710bn.

One could go on. Excluded from that figure are all municipal roads and the backlogs for six provinces and eight metros. The final, consolidated figure must be stratospherically big, whatever it is.

So that is roads and water. A couple of trillion each, at least. Then there is electricity (distribution infrastructure alone was last estimated to be in the range of R70bn), railways and rolling stock, ports, airports, schools, hospitals, universities and many other elements of the South African state besides.

And for each of them you could carry out the same exercise. For each of them, we have no consolidated figure. Indeed, we have no attempt even to generate such a figure. The depth and breadth of SA’s actual bankruptcy is unfathomable.

But don’t think this is an ANC government failure on its own, for poor management and bad policy surely contribute significantly to this backlog, even if not entirely. This is before you add to the equation — an exercise for another day — the full cost of the damage done to public infrastructure by the public itself: schools, clinics and universities burnt to the ground, train carriages torched, libraries vandalised, copper cable stolen, manhole covers lifted and sold as scrap.

It is a team effort, this: the state and the public working hand-in-hand to destroy and neglect public assets.

We live in a state of perpetual denial. And the state fuels this by the piecemeal manner in which it addresses and plans around our core national infrastructure. It has, very successfully, managed to compartmentalise our decay, all the way down into bite-sized chunks that we are just about willing to swallow.

But the full picture — the grand condition that is the state of the South African machine — is an exercise no one is interested in mapping. Understandably so, perhaps. It is a horror story of profound proportions.

All this article constitutes is but a mere glimpse into the scale of the problem.

But it is essential that someone do this: that a full and proper assessment of the exact extent of our core infrastructure be undertaken. It is essential because, in order to solve any problem, one must first understand it; likewise, to be able to properly measure any attempt or policy designed to address it over time.

Finally, this must be done because, if anything, it will focus the public mind, very particularly and very clearly on the problem. A national infrastructure backlog database would mean there is nowhere for anyone to hide.

We cannot continue like this, with vague plans to address divergent aspects of the South African state, fractured and broken down in a way that dilutes the fundamental problem and creates the impression it is smaller than it actually is.

It is huge, it is ever-expanding and, from what evidence is available, it is now exponential too — beyond the point where it can ever been brought under control by investment alone, and certainly not with the kind of pathetic economic growth rates the ANC government seems incapable of ever exceeding.

It is time for a reality check, and a serious one. SA is not just bankrupt, it is so far behind the curve, to borrow from the Department of Water and Sanitation, it can no longer see it.

• Van Onselen is the head of politics and governance at the South African Institute of Race Relations