When Koos Smit studied civil engineering on a public service bursary at the University of Pretoria in the 1970s, the plan was that he would qualify and build dams and pipelines.

However, an oversupply of engineers at the Department of Water Affairs saw him sign up at National Roads.

He remained at National Roads, and its successors, for the next 43 years, managing the development and maintenance of roads instead.

Smit will retire at the end of May, exiting the South African National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) as the entity’s engineering executive.

“I never regretted the decision to go National Roads. I have had some wonderful opportunities to grow as an engineer,” says Smit.

For the first eight years of his career, he was part of internal supervisory teams that procured and directed the construction of three diverse greenfield projects in different parts of the country.

He started off as an assistant resident engineer, and became a resident engineer midway through this period.

The projects included the construction of 7 km of N1 concrete freeway between Fairlands and Main Reef road, at an estimated current value of R1.1-billion.

Construction of this road included the relocation of 1.5 km of railway line carrying 600 000 commuters a day, as well as traversing a number of mine dumps, which had to be stabilised.

Another project was the construction of the N3 dual carriageway between Umhlatuzana and Key Ridge, in KwaZulu-Natal, which comprised 3.5-million cubic metres of earthworks, with a single embankment size of 1.35-million cubic metres. To complicate matters further, an unexpected visitor, cyclone Domoina, wreaked havoc halfway through the project.

After this eight-year period, Smit acted as engineer on the reconstruction of the Cradock to Cookhouse portion of the N10. He also managed the construction of greenfield projects on the Garden Route, as well as the North Coast toll road between Umhloti and Tinly Manor.

Toll Roads
In 1993, amid the political uncertainty in the build up to the change of government, Smit became involved with the proposed N1 toll road.

“With the fast-growing growing traffic on the N1 in the 1990s, there was a dire need to extend the N1 from Middelfontein to Polokwane, but, as there were no funds from the fiscus and limited borrowing capacity as a result of a cap on the State guarantee, it was decided to develop this 126 km of freeway as a public–private partnership (PPP), with off-government balance sheet financing.”

Legislation at the time, however, did not allow the private sector to collect tolls for its own account in order to construct and maintain the road, which meant the N1 tender was structured as a long-term performance contract in which government would collect the tolls.

This provided a revenue stream on which the prospective tenderers had to tender to procure financing to construct and maintain the road, then transferring the road back to the State within the shortest possible repayment period.

The shortest repayment period of 23 years tendered by the successful contractor, ends in October 2018.

“Despite uncertainty in the markets and our failure to obtain off-government balance sheet financing it was still a very successful partnership.” says Smit.

As a new government came to power in 1994, the responsibility for national roads was transferred to State-owned entity Sanral in 1998, with Smit joining the agency as engineering executive.

The new government wanted to create job opportunities grow the economy through the development of infrastructure. This placed three identified spatial development corridors on the table, explains Smit.

Toll road concessions – or upgrading of the roads through the user-pay principle – in the Maputo Development Corridor, the Platinum Corridor and the Durban-Gauteng Development Corridor saw financial close in less than six years.

The combined initial construction cost of the three concession projects was R19-billion, at current rand value, with the combined estimated cost of maintenance and improvements over the 30-year concession period around R28-billion, also in current rand-value.

“Our main challenge in the development of these projects was that there was very little or no experience of PPPs in government or the private sector at the time, nor any local guidelines or regulations,” says Smit.

“We had to start from scratch to carve out a concessions template that would suit the South African environment.”

Gauteng Toll Roads
Smit says he made “a modest contribution in the procurement methodology, as well as conceptualisation, structuring and procurement of the toll system service providers” of the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP), which led to the implementation of electronic tolling (e-tolling) on 200 km of Gauteng’s urban highways.

The project has faced much resistance from users, with compliance rates well below initial forecasts.

Political will and public acceptance are the main pre-requisites for an enabling environment to develop toll roads.

“I believe GFIP would have been a global flagship project if procured in a less complex enabling environment,” says Smit.

Smit says Sanral still has R120-billion of possible toll roads on its books, but warns that these projects will now have to join a long waiting list for Sanral’s non-toll budget.

Highlighting another challenge he faced in his career, he expressed his disappointment that the De Beer’s pass project, as a second route over the Drakensberg mountain range, has not been approved.

“It would have been of huge benefit to the economy of South Africa.”

Instead of building the De Beer’s pass, Sanral has opted to upgrade the existing alignment between Keeversfontein and Warden.

Core Function
Despite the large projects that have marked Smit’s career, he describes the task of developing and maintaining South Africa’s national road network as his core function.

“It is about the optimal investment of our non-toll budget of around R15-billion a year and the procurement of around 450 service providers on an annual basis in order to develop and maintain our road network. Overseeing the delivery cycle is where most of my energy goes, and there is no glory there, only hard work.”

He adds that nothing he has achieved at Sanral has been a “one-man show”.

“It is a huge team effort to procure and manage service providers to develop and maintain the national road network.”

No successor has been named for Smit yet.

He notes that he will do some consulting work upon leaving the Sanral office for the last time as engineering executive.