According to Chris Campbell the degradation we are witnessing in our transport infrastructure is a result of years of insufficient funding, corruption, and a shortage of skilled personnel. He says this deterioration is pervasive across all facets of the transport sector, indicating a systemic issue.
Most obvious to the layman is the state of our local and provincial roads, so riddled with potholes that they are starting to resemble our rural gravel road network. Road stormwater management systems have impacted the subsurface layers of our roads, compromising their long term integrity. Road safety signage and directional signboards in many instances are no longer visible or missing, leaving road users ignorant of speed restrictions or safety warnings.
Rail Complexities affecting Road Networks
Additionally, our short distance passenger commuter rail system operated by PRASA that ferried hundreds of thousands of commuters annually, at an affordable cost, played a vital role until it was completely crippled by mismanagement, corruption, theft and vandalism even prior to the lockdown periods of the COVID-19 pandemic aggravating an already dire situation.
The commuter passenger rail system has now reached a stage of dysfunctionality that the millions of commuters for whom the system was designed, are forced to use buses and minibus taxis, many of which are so dilapidated that it is unsurprising that they are a major contributor to our shocking road death toll rate.
Our railway network, with the iron ore and coal export railway lines, used to be at the cutting edge of heavy haul rail network technology. Now however, the critical long distance rail networks are mostly unreliable due to multiple shortcomings and lack the capacity to satisfy exporters anxious to capitalise on the export gains from high global commodity prices. Unsurprisingly, this has led to a boom in road freight with haulers filling the needs of mines, agriculture and logistics companies.
The result is that with these higher volumes of heavy road traffic, road safety has been compromised and the lifespan of many roads is being shortened as they were never designed for such high volumes of heavy axle load traffic.
The impact on our economy has been colossal. Government, through National Treasury, has openly admitted that we do not have sufficient money in our budget to meet all of the competing demands that we seek to fulfil. The significant immediate impact is driven by a highly diminished tax base with unemployment at 40 %, coupled with the lost revenue that could have been derived from higher volumes of exported commodities by rail and the failure to recover significant sums of money that was pillaged during the state capture period.
Infrastructure for Economic Growth
Bloated state employment with low levels of output would not be tolerated in the private sector and the same should be true in public sector if we are to optimise our spend on staffing costs. It is counterproductive to constrain the development of economic infrastructure at a time that we need to develop additional infrastructure for economic growth, whether logistics or tourism related.
Greater investment in functional roads, rail, air and sea, transport networks are all drivers to get our stagnant economy on a growth trajectory, which currently is projected by local and international economists’ at less than 1% of GDP (gross domestic product) in the current year; inferior to other competitive and developing economies where 3-4% is the norm.
Investment is needed in skilled people, for developing future skills together with a long term focus on ensuring that all of these transport systems are adequately operated and maintained to realise the on-going benefits of such economic infrastructure. We cannot afford to run these to failure and hope to have the funds required to build anew. Our railways are over 100 years old, so are our ports. We need to build on this legacy for the benefit of future generations rather than watch it erode into levels of dysfunctionality which will be hard to rectify. This will require the collective effort of both government and the private sector as committed partners in this process.
With respect to ensuring an enduring functional National Roads system, it does not make sense for a functional entity, such as SANRAL, to be continuously burdened with the responsibility for managing Provincial Roads. SANRAL already lacks the capacity to optimally manage their core routes, and burdening them with the need to develop additional specific capacity for the management of these Provincial roads, could be “the straw that breaks the camel’s back”.
Realistic Public Private Partnerships – addressing the skills challenge
One can include the need for stronger and more realistic public private partnerships as an initiative which has not been utilised sufficiently. One cannot, for example, expect parties
who may be interested in a concession on a major freight rail network, to make substantial investments where the contracted period is hopelessly too short. Other initiatives, which we are already busy with, is to separate the infrastructure asset owner from the user in the case of rail, to allow for multi-user access on a paid for basis as we do with toll roads. This idea has been bandied about for over twenty years and maybe we should be more serious about this and get this system implemented sooner.
The management and skills challenges will still need to be addressed in the immediate short term, as the vertical separation process will not happen quickly enough, and even if it does, it will require an optimally functional and capacitated ‘Infrastructure Manager’ to ensure that the network is ‘Reliable, Affordable, Available and Safe’ – ‘RAAS’. This was the mantra which many lived up to from the late nineties well into the early 2000s, in the railway infrastructure maintenance environment, when all efforts were being made to ensure that the rail service was indeed ‘Predictable’.
New projects build empowerment and economic inclusivity
Sections 217 in our Constitution requires that we at all times ensure, fairness, cost effectiveness, transparency and competitiveness, while using public procurement to drive the necessary economic inclusivity, which is still lacking in our post 1994 society. Ensuring the appropriate skills levels to implement these projects is imperative especially at local government level.
Better use should be made of the private sector consulting engineering capacity – Consulting Engineers South Africa (CESA) has close to 600 member companies employing thousands of engineering practitioners, who are utilised only to 80% of industry capacity. Many young engineering practitioners are emigrating to where their skills and knowledge is fully utilised.
We need to use new projects to build on our empowerment and economic inclusivity by developing competent and committed capacity among consulting engineering companies, contractors and suppliers. There can be no room for extortive practices and corruption, that has hampered many new projects to date.
More local capacity for the future will help to overcome foreign based approaches that seek to lend money to our country for development, while at the same time being allowed to take advantage of the financial opportunity that these projects present, to the exclusion of our local industries.
In conclusion, we need a collective approach in which government taps into the capacity and technical expertise available from the private sector to develop a comprehensive
transportation plan for our country. This plan needs to not only focus on the development of new infrastructure but also the maintenance of our existing infrastructure, aimed at meeting the needs of all participants in the transportation sector.
This hardhatOPINION was written by Chris Campbell the CEO of Consulting Engineers South Africa (CESA)
Follow our WhatsAPP channel here for informative content about the Construction and Built Environment Industries
Comments
Post a Comment