Treasury escalates responsibility for road upgrades to local government

National Treasury now requires provincial and local governments to implement a road asset management system in order to see road maintenance programmes getting off the ground faster. According to Marissa Moore, National Treasury’s acting chief director of public finance, urban development and infrastructure, a major problem has been the lack of spending by departments resulting in many road maintenance projects not taking place. “We have a road maintenance backlog of R149 billion. We cannot afford to have projects standing and maintenance not taking place due to inefficient or non-spending. Research has shown that if one waits three years to address a road problem, the cost goes up five times. If you wait five years, the cost increases 18 times.” Moore said to combat this Treasury had implemented a system that required provincial and local government to manage their road asset and manage it more effectively. “It was passed in 2006 but it was not enforced. We are now starting to tighten the noose and require them to submit a road asset management report. Effectively it means that the provinces and local governments have to collect data about their roads and be in a position to know what is going on, what state they are in, where the biggest demand is and so forth.” Moore said if such a report could not be submitted, Treasury was in a position to withhold the money until such time as a report was provided. Effectively, she said, this would lead to better spending as they would have to say what they wanted to spend the money on and would be monitored to ensure that it was spent on that specific project in the financial year in question. “68% of the national road network carries less than 5000 vehicles per day. We cannot forget our secondary roads and we have to become responsible in how we deal with them. We have to balance the national roads with the secondary network.” She said at the same time Treasury was making funding available to improve accounting and auditing systems of municipalities, as this would also address the lack of spending along with inefficient spending. “We are also looking at how we can centralise some of our procurement systems to overcome the problems that we face at provincial and municipal level. Treasury is saying to the authorities at this level that the expenditure must be linked to an efficiency measure and there must be an outcome otherwise they will not get the money.” Caption: ‘Maintenance programmes must get off the ground faster ... if you wait five years, the cost increases 18 times.’