If sustainable growth and developmental outcomes are to be attained the efficiency of South Africa’s economy needs to be significantly improved. Because a key ingredient of an efficient economy is good, reliable connectivity, this month’s dialogue addresses an element of infrastructure crucial to ensure effective connectivity for both freight/goods and people.

Specifically, this month’s dialogue will address the roads network of South Africa recognising that roads make an important economic and social contribution through improving efficiencies and opening up business opportunities and employment creation as well as providing access to social services such as educational, health and community facilities.

However, in doing this there are currently a range of crucial challenges of which the most urgent includes the following:

Institutional and regulatory environment – responsibility for the road network is spread across all three spheres of government; however some roads have not been allocated to a responsible authority – there remains in excess of 140 000kms country-wide which fall under no authority and thus receive no attention. The interface between spheres of government and authorities is also not always easily managed and thus proves to be problematic – for example the ongoing collapse of the Mpumalanga coal roads notwithstanding their strategic importance to the national economy or the lack of expansion of rural roads which continues to exclude many rural communities from social services and economic opportunities.

Funding – there is a need to expand the network and this has concomitant capital funding requirements; however this is exacerbated by the extremely high proportion of the network which has fallen into total disrepair (ie beyond the useful design life expectancy) and therefore needs replacement and is thus also a capital rather than maintenance cost. Lastly the funding for operations and maintenance is a serious problem, both in amount and availability.

Developmental leverage – roads over their whole life-cycle provide a wide range of economic opportunities; from labour intensive, small contractor construction and community based maintenance initiatives to PPPs.

To ensure that these challenges are confronted in a robust and broad based manner the speakers will be drawn from both the public (different spheres of government and/or agencies) and private sectors.

This dialogue provides the platform to review progress, debate constraints and identify opportunities for constructively moving forward.

Have Your Say…

Should you wish to participate in a discussion of this topic please click on the link below and indicate which sector you are from, namely Private, Public or Other.