Infrastructure is crucial to the development of South Africa, and will continue to be a focus for government policy and spending going forward.
“Over the past five years, we made significant progress with the provision of infrastructure,” says President Cyril Ramaphosa.
“More than R1,3-trillion has been invested to build hundreds of schools and two new universities, to build hundreds of thousands of new houses, to electrify more than a million homes, generate new electricity and to expand public transport.
“These infrastructure investments also helped grow our economy and create many new jobs in construction and other sectors. Infrastructure development has been flywheel of the engine of our economy and has yielded tremendous benefits for the country.”
However, the country needs to do more, he says. “Our infrastructure development has slowed down for a whole number of reasons. We have also realised that our infrastructure provision is too fragmented between the different spheres of government. ”
R100-billion will be pumped into the Infrastructure Fund over a 10-year period, to leverage financing from the private sector and development finance institutions.
Telecommunications has also come under the spotlight. “The telecommunications sector represents vast potential for boosting economic growth,” Ramaphosa adds.
“The Minister of Communications will shortly be issuing policy direction to the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa for the licensing of the high demand radio frequency spectrum.”