Infrastructure
(b) Over-budgeted Investment and/or
Poor Spending
Given the current poor records on capital
expenditure (e.g., up to 50% underspend),
and the notoriouspilferage of project
monies, any form of budgeting more
capital than necessaryshall be avoided
(e.g., “excess expenditure” is currently estimated at US$ 8 billion per annum).
(c) High Charges for Infrastructure
services:
The price of services provided is excessively high by any standard. For instance,
power could cost up to 0.46 US$/KWh
as compared to 0.05 to 0.10 US$/KWh in
other developing regions; water could
cost up to 6.56 US$/m3 as compared to
0.03 to 0.06 US$/m3 in similar regions;
and Internet access varies from 6.7 to
148.0 US$/monthas compared to 50
in South Africa and 11 other developing regions. It is believed that reducing
the cost of financing and of construction, operation and maintenance of
the infrastructure by way of design will
significantly reduce such exorbitant infrastructure service charges.
(d) Poor Rate of service charge
Collection:
SSA countries suffer from inefficient
(often bloated) charge-collection administration combined with ill-inspired
socialistic policies of free-package
schemes that result in “less than 50%”collection rates. This has often resulted in
utility companies lacking the financial
muscle to operate and maintain the
(already expensively-acquired) asset
base. Luckily, these are evils only policymakerscancorrect, not engineers and
projects managers, except reminding
them thatunaffordability of charges
due to overpriced designs and execution worsens this situation.
(e) Service Distribution Losses:
Unaccounted losses in most SSA countries are generally estimated at twice as
high as best practical – this is a thing design and maintenance engineers could
contribute to solving; broken pipes,
leaking reservoirs can be fixed … and
we are even lucky electricity does not
evaporate!
Fellow engineers and project managers
in Sub-Saharan countries, those many
wickedchallenges are standing in our
face – but we shall be glad that opportunities to address such are in our hands!
Pascal Mabelo