LABOUR-INTENSIVE CONSTRUCTION
What happened to the EPWP Infrastructure Sector? This definitive overview of the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) during the 2004/05 to 2018/19 period highlights its failure to create sustainable employment and deliver infrastructure. By Robert McCutcheon
W
ithin South Africa, there are insistent demands for public infrastructure and housing. These demands for public services lie at the core of current community discontent. Communities are also demanding jobs in an environment where levels of unemployment are extremely high and disturbing. The narrow definition of unemployment, which is the one always reported in the media, tracks those who are actively seeking employment. For all South Africans, it is over 27%. The broad definition includes those who have given up looking; it is over 37% for all South Africans. In turn, disaggregation reveals far more disturbing results. For black South Africans, the figure stands at around 46%. The next worst affected group is the 16 to 35 age group, at 68%. Not surprisingly, employment creation is a national priority. And work is the means whereby we recreate ourselves and the world around
us. It provides an income and contributes to personal and communal dignity. However, another component of the dire situation in South Africa is the fact that employment opportunities need to be created for large numbers of people who have little or no education and very few formal skills. The lack of education and skills are largely the disastrous legacy of the 1951 Job Reservation Act and the iniquitous 1953 ‘Bantu’ Education Act.
Economic growth Economic growth is widely postulated as the solution. However, in the absence of adequate economic growth and low levels of education and skills, what is the solution? In South Africa, public works programmes are acknowledged as having a role to play. The 2011 National Development Plan recommended that public employment programmes would form a component of employment strategy until 2030. Labourintensive industries were to be encouraged.
SA’s Expanded Public Works Programme South Africa’s Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) is one of government’s strategic responses to the triple challenge of poverty, unemployment and inequality. The greater use of modern labour-intensive methods (LIC) was at the intellectual core of the EPWP. LIC is the technically sound and economically efficient substitution of human effort for non-essential, fuel-based, ‘heavy’ equipment. It generates a significant increase in productive employment among ‘targeted labour’1 : the poor, unemployed and unskilled. By ‘significant’, what is meant is an increase of at least 300% to 650% in employment generated, without compromising
on cost, time and quality (once systems, including training, have been established). The range varies for different categories of construction. ‘Earthworks’ provide the main opportunity for this substitution. Earthworks comprise over 50% of the cost of most civil infrastructure projects: excavation, haul, unload and spread. Think ‘lots of small earthworks’, not ‘mass earthworks’. Legislation, regulations and procedures were introduced to promote LIC. However, LIC still hasn’t gained the traction it was meant to. A review of the available data confirms this. During the 15-year period between April 2004 and March 2019, the EPWP was allocated R1 540 153 million.2 Of this amount, some R1 149 835 million was apportioned to the Infrastructure Sector. In the end though, a total amount of R253 741 million was spent – of which the EPWP Infrastructure Sector component only came to R179 229 million. The degree of discrepancy between allocation and expenditure vividly illustrates the public sector’s well-known lack of capacity to deliver at national, provincial and local levels.3 However, overemphasis upon pervasive incapacity within the public sector shouldn’t distract us from manifold shortcomings in the implementation of the EPWP’s Infrastructure Sector itself. Between 2004 and 2019, expenditure on infrastructure generated over 1 260 000 person-years of employment.4 This is far less than should have been achieved. The large expenditure of public funds should have generated a huge increase in productive employment for the poor and unskilled – together with the concomitant, essential skills development (mainly for matriculants) required to organise and control on-site construction and maintenance.
IMIESA October 2020
23
