The UK government will provide expertise and support for SA’s efforts to improve infrastructure delivery and make better use of state-owned property under an agreement signed by UK chancellor of the exchequer Rachel Reeves and SA public works and infrastructure minister Dean Macpherson, in Durban this week on the sidelines of the G20 finance leaders’ meeting.
“Infrastructure investment in both of our countries is absolutely key to driving productivity, economic growth and, importantly, job creation and … our two governments in the UK and SA are working together to take forward this important agenda,” said Reeves, who said the project would support the SA government’s efforts to deliver economic growth and bring benefits to businesses in both countries, deepening the partnership between SA and UK.
The investment by the UK is not a fixed monetary amount but is focused on providing technical expertise and strategic support to the department’s delivery unit, which looks at high-impact projects in its three focus areas of infrastructure, asset management and municipal infrastructure, Macpherson said. “Unfortunately, we do not have the critical skills any more to be able to enact the turbocharging of infrastructure development that we need.
And the Foreign Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO), on behalf of the UK government, will be able to provide technical assistance and expertise through UK companies, “to put projects into an investment-ready portfolio, which is what we really need to do”, he said. Discussions on the deal had begun in November when Deputy President Paul Mashatile led a visit to the UK.
UK high commissioner to SA Antony Phillipson said the agreement answered a big issue for SA, which was that it took too long to get projects going, and even then they often stalled because they were not correctly planned or prepared.
“It’s not really about a fixed amount that we are putting on a table. It’s about investing in relationships. It’s about bringing our companies and their expertise here,” Phillipson said. He cited rail infrastructure, where the UK’s Crossrail International could bring its experience of big infrastructure projects around the world. There was also no fixed period for the UK investment, Phillipson said.
Macpherson said that in the year since he took office, his department — which packages and prepares infrastructure projects for line departments and SOEs — had doubled the construction book of infrastructure ready projects to R268bn in 250 projects, through Infrastructure SA.
But departments, SOEs and municipalities are responsible for procuring and constructing those projects and MacPherson’s view is that reforms to the system are needed if SA is to speed up infrastructure delivery.
“Many departments and SOEs are not infrastructure implementers — it is not their speciality — so we need more co-ordination and a more centralised form of procurement and implementation of projects under an entity like Infrastructure SA,” he said. “If we continue to procure and construct in the way we do, we will have very slow delivery.”
Macpherson has also made it a priority to restructure and reform the property management trading entity in the department, which owns and runs 88, 000 buildings and more than 5-million hectares of land but does not generate revenue from them.
“We are the only landlord in SA that doesn’t make money. We have become a benevolent society and charity for other government departments. That must change. These assets must make money for the state so that we can reinvest it into social infrastructure,” Macpherson said.
This week’s launch follows Reeves visit to Cape Town for February’s G20 finance meeting, when she participated in an side event at the V&A Waterfront to see the Waterfront expansion project on which UK companies Arup, and Turner & Townsend are working.
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