NEWS: No will left to build SA infrastructure

 There is widening pessimism that as a nation we are technically incompetent and cannot afford the risk of failure writes Rod Lloyd

I refer to Johann Siebert’s letter (“Gautrain on different track,” September 18). It is perhaps academic, but the possibilities and corresponding feasibility studies for an underground rail system primarily linking Pretoria to the southern townships via Johannesburg’s CBD was widely discussed in the 1970s.

As well as existing portfolios of major property conglomerates, new planning regulations prompted big whole-block building developments in the CBD. The likely route from Park Station southwards was deemed to be below Joubert street. Three of the major CBD developments designed at that time (that I have direct knowledge of) included provision for their basement shopping to either include an underground station or direct connection to one.

These were the Greatermans departmental store (now offices for a state utility), the Edgars building south of Oppenheimer Park, and the Carlton Centre developers, who assumed the scale of visitor numbers alone would warrant direct rail linkage.

All that CBD rail interface remained unrealised in 1989, but not forgotten. The “rapid-rail” prospect resurfaced during the late 1980s. While teaching at the Wits Planning School we studied implication of the then current concept, including significant “opportunity cost/savings” for residents to forego one car and pay for efficient rail.

To showcase the country’s values the Soccer World Cup is, worldwide, an unprecedented catalyst (or excuse) to instigate large numbers of nice-to-have but mostly unaffordable capital works. SA certainly did not disappoint the many thousands of soccer tourists, principally with magnificent stadiums. 

That the Gautrain was one of those projects makes sense, though never “invented as a money-generating project”, a rather odd interpretation made by Siebert.

Purely to examine what form even minor extensions to the Gautrain should be would alone require considerable cost, and certainly very exacting and well worked to meet World Bank/International Monetary Fund standards — most certainly not simply to boost government’s infrastructure image. Another vanity project?

If planning and discussion of a rail system in the 1970-1980 period had become academic — when private investment would have simply written off the cost of the underground system in the huge capital works being undertaken (high inflation at the time would have made it a steal within a few years) — the subject has now reverted again to academic status. 

The political will for the building of infrastructure, let alone maintaining what we have, has given way to a widening pessimism that as a nation we are technically incompetent and can’t afford the risk of failure. Thus, against past levels of world-rated competencies we appoint managerial people to run electrical, rail and municipal infrastructure and hope for the best for the technology.

Whereas in its heyday of excellence Eskom was run by extraordinary engineers — CEO Dr Jan Smit had a doctorate in diesel-electrical engineering — we now have people with proven managerial, accounting and legal competence leading, while relegating coalface competency engineers to be technicians.

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The intellectual difference between the two simply cannot be wished away. Anyone with a technical skill would understand how easily their best advice, often the most expensive, is put down by the ramifications coming out of spreadsheets and balance sheets with short-term horizons.

As with the SA Post Office, inherent value is reconceived and monetised as a bank without even remotely fixing the postal delivery. It requires more than “pulling together” to run a modern country.

This Opinion piece was written for Business Live by Rod Lloyd of Newlands, Cape Town