Local government failure is now systemic, engineers warn

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JEREMY MAGGS: With local government elections just months away, South Africans are asking a familiar question: will new political promises finally translate into functioning water systems, reliable sanitation and better infrastructure?

The South African Institution of Civil Engineering (Saice) says the real challenge is no longer diagnosing what’s broken – I guess we know that – but building the systems, building the skills and the accountability needed to fix it.

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Someone who’s applied her mind to that is Sekadi Phayane-Shakhane, who’s chief executive officer of the organisation. Sekadi, a very warm welcome and you’ll agree with me, we keep hearing about water shortages, sewage spills, failing infrastructure.

At what point – and maybe this is a philosophical start here – at what point do we stop calling this a crisis and actually refer to it as a systemic failure?

SEKADI PHAYANE-SHAKHANE: Thank you very much for this opportunity. I completely agree with you.

All the research, all the job reports from government have shown that we are beyond the critical state. Currently, we are in a systematic breakdown, as you have called it.

So we are there. We are there now. Because, as much as these are technical failures from an infrastructure perspective, it’s also a governance architecture that ensures that these technical failures keep happening.

JEREMY MAGGS: So is it governance architecture, because you also say the blueprint to fix local government already exists. If that is true, why then are we struggling to deliver basic services? Is it all about governance?

SEKADI PHAYANE-SHAKHANE: I think so, and we believe that from Saice’s perspective, we believe that fundamentally governance problems come with engineering consequences. So under the current constitutional setup, municipalities hold all the protected mandates for water, for sanitation and electricity, and even when they lack the technical capacity to deliver them.

So it means that the system protects the dysfunction instead of protecting the residents’ rights to water services, electrical services as well.

So we do believe that from a governance perspective, there needs to be a lot of rework that is happening and which is what the White Paper on local government is also saying, which we agree with.

JEREMY MAGGS: So am I overreaching here when I say that municipalities should simply lose responsibility for water and sanitation? Are we at that point?

SEKADI PHAYANE-SHAKHANE: We are definitely at that point. We have to technically safeguard our assets.

So the ability to reassign functions like water reticulation when a municipality is not coping and they don’t have the correct technical team to ensure that they can deliver these, should be taken away from them. That’s exactly what the White Paper is also saying.

We really want to see a point in South Africa where we move from policy and we actually start actioning what the policy is saying and see municipalities start losing these functions and then being reassigned to entities that can take up these responsibilities and ensure that we keep up with service delivery and infrastructure asset management.

JEREMY MAGGS: You will concede, though, that that could be politically explosive. How do you take powers away from elected structures without undermining local democracy?

SEKADI PHAYANE-SHAKHANE: That is so true and that we will leave to government to sort out. But I think National Treasury right now has started with incentivising models for municipalities. So instead of punishing them, they almost incentivise them.

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If you have technical capacity, tick, if you are performing, tick, and then they give you more money, if I can put it that way. So it’s almost like a transition period that we’re going through to get to what we finally see as a model that will work towards infrastructure asset management.

JEREMY MAGGS: You’ve also called for professional registration to be mandatory for senior technical posts. Do you think that unqualified appointments are still the significant factor behind infrastructure failure?

SEKADI PHAYANE-SHAKHANE: Yes, definitely. Also, what we always say is that senior technical roles in municipalities must be filled by professionally registered engineers and technologists.

You realise that when you’re professionally registered, you have a personal accountability for infrastructure decisions, and there’s someone who holds you responsible, which is your regulator. Whether it’s the SACPCMP (South African Council for Project and Construction Management Professions) or the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA).

And without this personal accountability and having almost like a big brother overlooking what you do on a day-to-day basis, then there is no accountability.

So we really believe that with this governance framework, South Africa will be able to get engineers to come and solve engineering problems, and ensure that we have effective service delivery.

ECSA has also now started implementing its identification of engineering work regulations. So any engineering work in South Africa must be undertaken by professionally registered engineers and technologists.

JEREMY MAGGS: You also, if I’ve read this correctly, support longer terms for municipal managers and you’ll need to explain that to me, because I would suggest that South Africans might not have confidence that longer tenure won’t simply entrench poor performance.

SEKADI PHAYANE-SHAKHANE: I think there’s a problem with consequence management, and because of the problem with consequence management and holding people to account and ensuring that some of the key performance indicators are not just leadership and so on, but in terms of infrastructural performance, that is why we have that mistrust.

But having longer terms will ensure that the municipal manager has a long-term view of what it is that they’re doing, and it will help them also to go from being more annual, project-oriented, like what is currently happening, to be more long-term oriented in terms of what the municipality is and the work that the municipality is doing in terms of programme management and the infrastructure programmes that they want to undertake.

We’re seeing more and more long-term planning that is taking place.

I can use an example being the City of Cape Town, where they have five to 10-year plans for infrastructure development. We believe that having this long-term leadership overview will give that particular person an opportunity to see their programmes through.

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So if you have that and you have proper consequence management and review of performance linked to these outputs that come out of these long-term programmes, then you can justify having longer-term municipal managers.

JEREMY MAGGS: Let me ask you one last question. You’ve put a lot of ideas on the table, but I wonder if the numbers don’t count against you. Municipalities currently have more than 7 000 vacancies in the water sector alone. Sekadi, how realistic is it to expect a turnaround when the skills pipeline that you’ve referenced is already under such pressure?

SEKADI PHAYANE-SHAKHANE: It really is not easy. I think, from all sectors, that’s why this problem is not just a municipal problem, it’s a South African problem.

From all sectors, we are doing our part to ensure that the skills pipeline is being mentored and capacitated to get to a place where we have proper skills and with enough experience to be able to deal with the crisis that we are in in terms of a capacity perspective.

There are also a lot of retired engineers and technologists who want to assist in this and to mentor people who are quite young and coming up the ladder. I think the people are there.

We probably do not have enough professionally registered people As I said, we’re doing a lot of work in terms of capacitation and mentoring and ensuring that people are coming through the professional registration cycles.

But it is a long-term project, if I can put it that way.

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I don’t think in terms of the turnaround that we will see a turnaround in the next two or three years, but if the infrastructure or the frameworks are put in place, then in the next five to 10 years, we can see a turnaround in terms of service delivery within our municipalities.

This problem did not happen two years ago. It’s taken 10 to 15 years of dysfunction for us to get to where we are now.

JEREMY MAGGS: Thank you very much indeed. That is Sekadi Phayane-Shakhane, who is the chief executive officer of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering.