A month ago, I took my family on a week-long vacation to Port Shepstone, a beautiful city on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal. Upon our arrival at the guesthouse, the owner informed us that while the floods that had devastated the province weeks prior had done minimal damage to the property, there were water challenges resulting from damage to the municipal water pipeline.
Therefore, we would need to ration our water. The guesthouse was pumping water from the ground and storing it in tanks. He informed us that in the past year, municipal water pipes had been vandalised numerous times.
The modus operandi was to cut open a small part of the pipeline, which would then require repairing. But in the latest incident, almost 500m of the pipe had been cut off, necessitating complete replacement of the entire pipeline.
There has been an increase of theft and vandalism of water and energy infrastructure across the country. Zahid Badroodien, the mayoral committee member for water and sanitation in the City of Cape Town, recently reported that damage to the water and sanitation infrastructure has cost the metro R41m in this financial year.
The metro is recording an increase of at least 500 drain covers being stolen in a month. More than 20 pump stations have been vandalised in the city. The situation is so dire that the municipality is offering R5,000 to any resident who reports incidents or information related to such theft and vandalism, which leads to a successful arrest or the recovery of stolen equipment.
There are two leading causes for the theft and vandalism of public infrastructure in the country. The first is the growing local and international market for scrap metal and copper. Market research and competitive intelligence provider, Fact.MR, estimates that the scrap metal recycling market will experience a growth rate of 5.5% to reach US$103bn (R1.6-trillion) from 2021-2031.
According to the Copper Alliance, global copper consumption is steadily increasing. The demand cannot be met by the current supply. This high demand for copper and the lucrative prices it offers is fuelling the vandalism of the country’s electricity network by largely foreign syndicates who ship the copper out of the country illegally. This was confirmed by the Hawks at the recent Johannesburg Energy Indaba.
The second cause of theft and vandalism of public infrastructure is tenderpreneurs. These individuals, through political connections, do business with the state. They intentionally destroy infrastructure so that their companies may bid for tenders to repair or replace it.
They pay a small fee to unemployed young men to cut electricity cables and water pipes, then wait on the government to request bids. Through their connections in supply chain management, they are awarded the tenders. This is the case in Port Shepstone where, according to our host, the pipes are being vandalised and companies with political connections being used to repair them.
These two factors are interlinked and this can be seen particularly in the education sector. For example, since the shift to paperless classrooms, schools across the Gauteng province have been vandalised and equipment stolen.
On the surface, the aim is simply to steal and re-sell the equipment to make money. But an underlying objective is to create a demand for security guards in the schools.
This would require that a security tender be issued. These are usually multi-million rand and multi-year tenders that make security company owners incredibly rich.
Tenderpreneurs are posing a serious risk to our country’s development. Without very serious intervention in this crisis, they will vandalise and steal infrastructure until nothing is left.
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