“No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune.” – Plutarch (ca. AD 46– 120)

STEPHAN Flynn, author of The Edge of Disaster, said in The Crumbling of America: “When we look at Rome as a great civilisation, a big part of what made it so great was the infrastructure. The road systems, the bridges, the aqueducts. As the Romans started to neglect that investment, they crumbled and collapsed, and we ended up with the dark ages.”

The same could be said of South Africa. For many years, South Africa’s infrastructure has been impressive. However, in the last few years, South Africa's infrastructure has deteriorated. Almost all its infrastructure has collapsed or is crumbling. The only remaining infrastructure that has remained unscathed is strongly fragile, as it is by now dated and highly vulnerable. The fragility has manifested itself through potholes and collapses of bridges. Climate change has wreaked havoc as well.

Potholes not only pose serious risks for the residents but also expose the extent of apathy and corruption. They present a sordid picture of civic neglect. They have virtually turned death traps for motorists and commuters. The number of accidents and mishaps happens quite regularly due to potholes, some of which become water-filled, rendering them hidden from being noticed.

The issue of potholes reminds me of one of the pieces that was penned by the African historian and political scientist of venerability, Professor Ali Mazrui. In his piece Is Africa Decaying? The foremost African historian and political scientist Mazrui quotes the Japanese, who once asked themselves: “Can we modernise economically without westernising culturally?”

After serious deliberations, the Japanese confidently declared: “Yes, we can modernise economically without westernising culturally. We just choose. We shall go for western techniques, and retain the Japanese spirit (heritage).”

Professor Mazrui poignantly points out that the problem with Africa is that it has been westernising culturally without modernising economically. He further states that the Western countries have been to the moon several times, yet Africans are still trying to get to the villages, and the villages are daily receding because of potholes.

A Kenyan brother said in Kenya they normally notice a person who is sozzled when he or she drives his car straight. Sober people drive their cars zigzag because the city streets are replete with potholes.

On September 13, 2004, US President George W Bush visited Michigan. After being jolly and generously introduced to make a few remarks, his introductory remarks had the following sentence: “I appreciate the mayor being here. Mr Mayor, thank you for coming. My only advice is fill the potholes.”

Given this background, one finds President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent tour of the city of Johannesburg, in which he expressed shock to discover that the streets in Johannesburg have potholes, and that litter lies for months uncleared, equally shocking. Either President Ramaphosa is completely out of touch, or he is deliberately being disingenuous.

The truth is that people have become accustomed to living with the filth of Johannesburg city. People have been living with this neglect for years. The situation, therefore, requires a particular attention to the evaluation of existing infrastructure and to the planning of improvement and/or modification works.

In particular, attention must be focused on the need to assess the degradation and estimation of the residual capacity of the structures in operational conditions. The road infrastructures are very vulnerable, as they are afflicted by design (structural and technological) deficiencies essentially linked to the construction period, the applied technologies, and the used materials, together with, especially in the last years, a lack of appropriate maintenance.

What the president experienced is tantamount to a collapsed bridge. A bridge shouldn’t just fall down. It means warning signs were ignored that could have prevented the collapse of the bridge. The poet Langston Hughes asked: “What happens to a dream deferred?” Does it “fester like a sore” or “stink like rotten meat?” What happens to maintenance deferred? “Maybe it just sags/like a heavy load.” Or does it implode?

I find this quotation from a book called What Matters Now by Gary Hamel very appropriate to describing our collapsed road infrastructure in our dear country. He describes how the erosion of good values in a country could lead to system collapse.

It reads thus: “Another contributing factor is the incremental nature of moral decay. Standards seldom tumble all at once; instead, they ratchet down gradually through a series of small, nearly innocuous compromises. That’s why the deterioration is easy to miss or dismiss. As with a slowly rusting bridge, no alarms sound until after the structure has collapsed. Faced with the carnage, people scratch their heads and wonder, how the hell did this happen? The answer: bit by bit.”

Without dwelling much on the bridge example, suffice to say that when a bridge collapse occurs, the failures provide critical information for engineers to learn from past mistakes. Sometimes it takes a tragedy to get decision-makers to pay attention. I think the biggest thing to have come out of President Ramaphosa’s shock visit will be that, as a nation, moving forward, we will have to spend more money replacing and maintaining Metros like Johannesburg and Durban. Fortunately for Durban, Mayor Cyril Xaba has begun implementing the turnaround strategy.

How one wishes our city leaders could learn from Dan McNichol, author of The Roads That Built America, who said in The Crumbling of America: “Structurally deficient could mean something like, ‘It needs to be replaced in five years,’ or structurally deficient could mean, ‘It’s on the verge of a collapse.’" Against this background, this therefore means that civil engineering design and construction processes must emphasize the safety and serviceability of infrastructure.

Interestingly, in recent years, most infrastructure is planned not only to endure external and internal disturbance without significant loss of integrity and functionality over time but also to improve sustainability elements in every stage of the design and construction. The robustness of infrastructure is tied to societal vulnerability and resilience. As an example, the formation of subsurface voids, leading to ground and sinkhole subsidence, represents a risk of infrastructure performance, which can be potentially detrimental to the safety of humans as well as the environment and communities.

Roads have a vital importance in South Africa’s infrastructural system, because of their great ability to penetrate South Africa’s length and breadth. Moreover, their maintenance can represent, together with the protection of buildings and industrial plants and restoration of the historical heritage, a great driving force for economic development for the country.

When one analyses South Africa’s crumbling and collapsed road infrastructure by benchmarking against the reputable road infrastructures of the best in the world, a “framework” on road infrastructure safety emerges, and it can be summarised as follows:

Absence of an adequate degree of structural ductility and strength, mostly linked to the period of construction and/or the employed material;
Maintenance plans not foreseen or not often carried out, which amplify the deficiencies of the structural system and, consequently, the unpredictable behaviour of the construction;
Durability problems (above all) related to the choice of the material used;
Monitoring systems applied to already degraded constructions that do not premise to fully interpret the state of progress of the degradation itself are, in many cases, not homogeneous and inefficient. Often the results are unintelligible, illegible or irrelevant to assess security at a certain absolute magnitude;
The intrinsic vulnerabilities related to the structural technology adopted are low retrofit design capacity linked to the "static" nature of the structural design of road infrastructures. In the imminent future, we will have to face the problem of the deteriorated structure management and, above all, of the survey methodologies. This will be crucial because, for the prestressed reinforced concrete structures, there are reduced external evidences of damage and/or deterioration.

* Dr Vusi Shongwe works in the Department of Arts and Culture in KwaZulu-Natal and writes in his personal capacity.

** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.