Municipal infrastructure management and its impact on service delivery in the City of Ekurhuleni

Abstract

Background: Property, plant and equipment (PPE) represent a significant portion of the asset base of any municipality and thus a municipality has a moral and legislative duty to safeguard these assets against damage and/or wilful neglect.

Aim: This article explored how infrastructure management within the City of Ekurhuleni (COE), Gauteng province in the Republic of South Africa, can assist in the provision of sustainable services and how the city’s infrastructure can contribute to social and economic development of its communities. This article endeavours to indicate how the COE manages its infrastructure in terms of three service delivery departments as a sample of the entire municipality. This article focuses on the improvement of infrastructure management in general and at the COE, in particular. It further aims to indicate how service departments can go about in employing asset-management guidelines whilst improving governance strategies.

Methods: This study followed a mixed-method approach and the system’s theory served as the research methodology. The study covered a 5-year period from 2014/2015 to 2018/2019 financial years and employed benchmarking ratios and calculations to indicate how best the city can improve its management of infrastructure, and measure its performance against those of equally sized metropolitan municipalities.

Results: The findings of the study reveal that even though the city is doing well in terms of certain aspects of service delivery, there still remain many issues regarding the management of infrastructure that impede its ability to provide sustainable services that can ultimately lead to economic growth and development.

Conclusion: Recommendations to the city include the upskilling of especially the senior management in terms of the critical role they play in maintaining the city’s infrastructure assets. Another recommendation is that politicians do not only think in terms of adding to the city’s current infrastructure whilst not attending to the maintenance of existing assets and most critically, the city does not follow an integrated approach in terms of the comprehensive infrastructure programme.