Transformation in infrastructure policy from apartheid to democracy

Abstract

Policy associated with basic infrastructure investment -- water and sanitation systems, new electricity lines, roads, stormwater drainage, and other services provided at municipal level -- has been one of the most troubling aspects of the first five years of African National Congress rule. Enormous challenges were offered by the infrastructural backlog and ecological inheritance. Notwithstanding rhetoric (and Constitutional provisions) to the contrary, government quickly retreated from its original electoral mandate. Following a section that provides brief historical context, this paper offers a reminder of infrastructure policy directives in the Reconstruction and Development Programme, continuities in ideology represented in the government's main housing/infrastructure policy documents (especially those finalised during 1996-98), and frictions associated with the delivery process, particularly in the growing reliance upon municipal services privatisation. The paper identifies key moments in the policy-making process, and argues that it is only with a different ideological approach (drawing upon sound technical analysis) on the part of key politicians and officials -- as well as a more liberatory perspective and political will in South Africa's civil society movements -- that transformation of policy and hence delivery will one day be possible.