​Thembisa Shologu
The South African government held its Inaugural Public Works and Infrastructure Summit to address the country's poor infrastructure.  
The two-day summit, held at the Sandton Convention Centre, is led by the Council for the Built Environment (CBE) and has the theme "Turning South Africa into a construction site: Growing the economy and creating jobs."
It aims to explore strategies for optimising asset life cycles, using public-private partnerships, and ensuring equitable infrastructure investments.
Premier Panyaza Lesufi spoke at the event, which aimed to find lasting solutions to infrastructure challenges.
"We come here as Gauteng not only to grace this event but to embrace its intentions and possible solutions that will be suggested today, thus stepping aside out of petty differences to ensure that we attend to issues that need our immediate attention. 
"Especially the three urgent matters that confront us: the urgent need to replace old infrastructure and invest in the new infrastructure, the urgent need to end vandalism and lawlessness in particular by organised syndicates and the urgent need to maintain and improve public infrastructure," said Premier Lesufi. 
Lesufi said the Gauteng Institute for Architecture (GIFA) played a critical role in unlocking infrastructure investments in the province. 
He added that its focus was on ensuring that the government attracted the necessary funding and partnerships to drive the development of key infrastructure projects. 
"We cannot solely rely on the government budget. We must deal with the simple basics: fill the potholes, ensure traffic lights are working, clean our city and ensure everyone is safe in our province. 
"We need to ensure we reposition our province to be a province that many people prefer; if we cannot do this, no matter how hard we work to attract investment, we are not going to succeed," said Premier Lesufi.  
Minister for Public Works and Infrastructure Dean Macpherson echoed Lesufi's sentiments that for the government to embark on this transformation journey of turning the country into a construction site, collaboration across government, business, and community was key to repositioning infrastructure. 
Minister Macpherson now said it was time to put words into action and ensure that every infrastructure project laid the foundation for future growth opportunities. 
"For too long, we have been talking about the same thing. Today's gathering is an important event to improve and improve infrastructure delivery across the country. 
"We can no longer talk about grand plans and visions; it's time to get the shackles into the ground and cranes into the sky. 
"For too long, we have been discussing the same thing without delivering the results that the people of our country expected from us, and we have to change. 
We have to find innovative approaches and fresh thinking to turbocharge our infrastructure delivery, so SA is not short of great plans, but we lack the required follow-through," he said. 
Macpherson expressed concern about how long communities have waited for high-quality infrastructure such as schools, police stations, hospitals, roads, and railways, including urban infrastructure projects that suffer abuse at the hands of corruption.
He said the urgent need to redefine procurement and infrastructure was crucial, urging that the scripture be changed once and for all.  
"Year after year, the Auditor General (AG) of South Africa details this in various reports. These include inadequate feasibility studies for poor projects, monitoring of procurement inefficiencies, contracts, underperformance, delayed budgets, and cost overrating.
"It's an all-too-common story in South Africa in towns and cities where infrastructure projects are abandoned or half complete, and we simply pay far too much for far too little," he alluded. 
He said the department had launched a skills audit to ensure that necessary skills were acquired to execute its mandate. 
They were also cracking down and getting tough on bad deals and expenditures. 
"We've established a special project unit within the department to specifically address failed, stored construction projects and to turbocharge those new and catalytic ones. 
"We also learned of the slow pace in delisting non-performing or corruption-accused suppliers. This is simply unacceptable and needs to be virtually addressed if we want to reverse the culture of impunity. 
"This is why we have started working to reform our blacklisting policy, which will ensure that contractors who had to perform or engage in unethical practices will no longer have the privilege of working on public projects for any department or stealing from the state," said the minister.