From decline to delivery: Rethinking South Africa’s infrastructure model

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Increasingly, experts point to the need for a shift from short-term fixes to lifecycle management, stronger accountability and disciplined execution.

Rethinking the role of public-private partnerships and improving governance could be key to breaking the cycle of underperformance and unlocking infrastructure as a driver of long-term economic growth.

A lifecycle problem

Junaid Kader, head of public private partnerships and infrastructure at Tsebo, identifies the root cause clearly: "South Africa's infrastructure difficulties stem from a governance-, financial discipline- and asset-management crisis." What appears as engineering failure is, in his framing, a financial-governance crisis manifesting as an engineering failure, the visible expression of deeper structural gaps that have built up over time.

"Infrastructure has often been delivered without a genuine lifecycle approach," he explains. "Assets are built and commissioned, but the long-term plan for maintaining them, the funding, the staffing, the systems, has not always followed. Decisions have historically been driven by upfront capital costs rather than the total cost of ownership over the lifespan of the asset."

Three structural gaps compound one another. Lifecycle costing has rarely been embedded into planning decisions, making the long-term maintenance bill invisible when budgets are set.

Maintenance has tended to be reactive rather than preventative and responsibility is often fragmented across multiple departments, with no single entity accountable for performance across the full asset lifecycle from build to operation.

These are not insurmountable problems, but they require deliberate, systemic reform to address.

When funding meets structural constraints

South Africa has committed substantial resources to infrastructure, reflecting a genuine prioritisation of public services. The challenge is that funding remains insufficient relative to the scale of the backlog and has not always translated into optimal outcomes.

As Kader puts it: "There is money in the system, but it is not translating into sustainable infrastructure outcomes."

The reasons are structural. Municipal grant funding particularly the Municipal Infrastructure Grant has typically been oriented toward new construction with less emphasis on rehabilitation and preventative maintenance. Where maintenance budgets do exist, they face competing pressures from operational costs.

At the same time the revenue collection remains weak, tariffs are often non-cost reflective and infrastructure revenues particularly from electricity are not consistently ring-fenced for reinvestment into networks.

Non-revenue water losses in some municipalities now approach 50 to 60 percent, reflecting both ageing infrastructure and limited operational capacity. The infrastructure backlog, particularly when it comes to the delivery of water, sanitation, and electricity, is estimated to require billions of rand to address.

Additional funding alone will not resolve the crisis unless the underlying system is restructured to sustain assets over time.

Interconnected systems, interconnected risks

South Africa's infrastructure systems have become deeply interdependent. When electricity supply is disrupted, water-treatment plants stop functioning. When water falters, sanitation follows. Hospitals, businesses, and households feel the downstream effects simultaneously.

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This interconnectedness means infrastructure failures do not remain contained they cascade across sectors. This means solutions must also be integrated. Addressing electricity in isolation from water, or water in isolation from sanitation, misses the interdependencies linking these systems.

Resilience requires co-ordinated planning and execution, something that is difficult to achieve when responsibility is fragmented across departments.

The private sector: a structured partner

The private sector has a role to play, not as a replacement for government, but as a structured delivery partner. Kader is clear on the distinction: "The most effective model is a structured partnership, where government retains control and private sector delivers performance."

Under a finance-build-operate-transfer model, private partners take on lifecycle responsibility. Maintenance is contractually embedded and ring-fenced rather than subject to annual budget pressures and assets are returned to government in agreed condition. Importantly this model requires a capable state, not a diminished one. Effective regulation, performance monitoring and tariff oversight are prerequisites for PPPs to serve the public interest.

A solvable challenge

Kader's analysis points toward agency, not despair. It is about stopping the decline first then rebuilding capability. Stabilisation is achievable. What is needed, he says, is not only new policies but clear accountability and disciplined execution.

Five priorities stand out:

• Shifting to lifecycle-oriented infrastructure management.
• Ring-fencing infrastructure revenues for reinvestment into maintenance.
• Establishing clear accountability for asset ownership.
• Strengthening execution capacity through regional technical teams and stronger procurement.
• Developing a credible pipeline of well prepared, bankable PPP projects.

While South Africa has strong institutional frameworks and financing mechanisms to meet this challenge, they are not consistently translated into sustained asset performance, resulting in infrastructure deteriorating faster than it is maintained.

What is required is alignment around the right diagnosis that this is fundamentally a system challenge and a sustained commitment to act on it. This includes a shift from a build-focused approach to lifecycle asset management, with ringfenced maintenance, stronger accountability, improved technical capacity, and better execution discipline.

The pipes, the roads, the power lines are not the root problem they are where the opportunity to build something better becomes most visible. The real challenge lies in how we govern, fund, and manage them. Get that right, and infrastructure stops being a point of failure and becomes the foundation of sustained performance and growth.