After Tony Leon takes a road trip from Johannesburg to the eastern parts of the Free State he reflects on South Africa’s crumbling infrastructure, and how it reveals a stark contrast between neglect and functional governance, and why there is an urgent need for systemic change.
A recent drive from Lanseria Airport outside Johannesburg to Clarens, the delightful town nestled at the foot of the majestic Maluti mountains on the eastern part of the Free State, reminded me of John le Carre’s wisdom.
He noted that “a desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world”. This road trip discounted any such danger when it came to commenting on our infrastructure (or its lack), it brought its own hazards.
Obstacle course
The 350km trip amounts to an obstacle course in avoiding potholes, literally from exiting the airport, right through to joining the N3 highway, and then the obstacle course recommences from Harrismith to Bethlehem and beyond.
Entering the truly wondrous Golden Gate Highlands National Park adds another hazard. Your eyes should be on the sweeping panorama of its sandstone splendours. Instead, you need to keep an eye out for the next pothole ahead. I lost count after around 20 in a one-hour drive through the park.
SANParks, a state agency controlled by the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE), is in charge of Golden Gate. Whatever its other merits and achievements, the care and maintenance of the roads circling this national treasure do not apparently rate high on its list.
Bottom of the list
But while tourists – local and international – might, if unwary, break the axles of their cars on this obstacle course, the roads outside in the eastern Free State are the responsibility of dozens of local councils. My recent drive suggests that “care and maintenance” is right at the bottom of the list of municipal priorities.
We habituate ourselves to dysfunction and decay, that is the human condition, though it should not be normalised.
Indeed, for Johannesburg residents, there is a contest – besides crater-sized potholes in places, between crippling water shortages and a recent report of raw sewage flowing down Oxford Road “for over two weeks now”, according to local resident Jonathan Witt.
He added: “It flows into storm water drains, which flow into Zoo Lake. The City [Council] could not care less, despite being repeatedly notified of this.”
Add in a partially opened city library, a shuttered art gallery and a civic centre abandoned since 2023 after a fire, and the self-proclaimed “world class African city” mockingly reinvents the meaning of the word “hubris”.
The failed city of Johannesburg is the visible tip of a much larger and more sinister iceberg: the veritable collapse of smaller municipalities dotting the road between Gauteng and the eastern parts of the Free State, whose collapse I recently witnessed firsthand.
It is not as though the budgets for restoration have not been itemised. No less an authority than the president himself provided some statistics: a year ago, Cyril Ramaphosa told the Sustainable Infrastructure Development Symposium South Africa (SIDSSA) that SA needs an additional R1.6 trillion in public sector infrastructure investment and a further R3.2 trillion from the private sector, within five years, to “achieve the country’s infrastructure goals”.
If CR “loves big numbers” as one National Treasury noted, this is an eye-watering amount.
Expanding debt costs
And the failed recent national budget, when eventually passed, will not provide anything approaching this amount. Too much is consumed by expanding debt costs (national debt stands at R5tn and rising each year) and paying public servant salaries.
The same public servants, at national and local level, who should be fixing the roads and maintaining the water supply.
Except at the local government level, especially in smaller ones like those in the Free State, grants allocated for infrastructure maintenance and upgrades are routinely underspent or simply misappropriated. In some cases, less than half of the municipal infrastructure grant is being spent as intended.
Avoiding potholes on cratered roads was one jeopardy of my recent road trip. Another was dodging aggressive and endless truck drivers barrelling on roads – large and small. And this relates to a larger, and even more economically threatening hazard: the collapse of freight rail services, forcing the trucks to carry the load once borne by Transnet.
Of course, all these “challenges” as Ramaphosa euphemistically describes them are highlighted in state speeches. In the case of Transnet, there is now an attempt of some seriousness to fix the problem. But it has mushroomed and metastised on the watch and under the eye of the same administration, which now promises to fix it.
Will the private sector pony up the R3.2 trillion needed to repair the gap?
Not according to Jannie Durand – chief executive of Remgro, the investment holding company, which houses an array of diverse enterprises in its portfolio and is the ninth largest publicly traded company listed on the JSE.
He told the company’s capital markets day last month: “We prefer not to be in business with the government. Doing acquisitions in South Africa to achieve inorganic growth is difficult.”
Intense regulatory environment
In a joined-up government, where each of its silos was collaborating to meet national challenges, such as the collapsed infrastructure, there would be care and maintenance too for the needs of the private sector.
Not so in SA according to Durand. “The regulatory environment makes it very difficult, and getting deals passed by the Competition Commission is becoming increasingly challenging.”
And that’s just one example of many. Here’s a very basic idea beyond maintaining roads and rail. If you want the private sector to stump up investment, just make it easier and less painful for them to invest.
I flew back from Lanseria after my Free State adventure and landed in Cape Town. The 30km distance from the airport to home was across a variety of highways and smaller roads. Not a single pothole on any of them. Perhaps this is the normal condition of a functioning state or city. The pity for the country is that it is an exception.
Although it’s late, it’s still not too late for one city’s exception to become the national and local rule elsewhere. Perhaps our lords and masters could humble themselves and take note.
