As a growing global player, South Africa would do well to pioneer the ‘smart city’ concept on the continent, but this would require the alignment of local legislation with international best practice on asset management, said physical asset management firm Pragma sales and marketing director Nico Mabaso.

He described the concept of ‘smart cities’ as the modern approach to providing traders with a complete infrastructure base to stimulate and sustain competitive trade.

The term ‘infrastructure’ indicated business services, housing, leisure and lifestyle services, transport and information technology, with an emphasis on a “wired” city as the main development model and on connectivity as the source of growth.

“The ‘smart city’ concept is upon us and South African cities have the basic infrastructure to be African pioneers of this, but only if we manage internal bureaucracy and view asset management as a strategic imperative and not a compliance nuisance,” Mabaso averred in a statement on Thursday.

A sound asset management system, such as that described in national asset management standard ISO 55000, would be required to ensure that ‘smart cities’ maintain reliable infrastructure to fulfill the needs of city dwellers.

Mabaso added that urban performance relied on the city's endowment of hard infrastructure and on the availability and quality of knowledge, communication and social infrastructure.

“This infrastructure is run on physical assets that require whole-of-life asset management (WOLAM) that will result in sustainable cities. The WOLAM is an integrated asset management framework intended to manage physical assets from ‘cradle to grave’,” he said.

Mabaso commented that South African cities were currently characterised by substantial infrastructure aging and decay.

He believed that government had, since 1994, focused on providing much-needed basic services such as healthcare, water and electricity to rural areas, thus, neglecting general upgrades and maintenance on current infrastructure.

To deal with this challenge, it had subsequently developed regulations, such as the Government Infrastructure Asset Management Act and the Guidelines for Asset Management of Local Government, the Generally Recognised Accounting Practices 17, the Municipal Finance Management Act and the Public Management Finance Act.

However, Mabaso was of the opinion that, while these pieces of legislation were efficient for accountability purposes, they did not provide enough detail in terms of how the asset owner and asset user could comply with the minimum standards.

He added, however, that “all is not doom and gloom” in terms of South Africa’s infrastructure ambitions.

“The National Development Plan has identified all the components of a ‘smart city’ as key developmental points, which means that South Africa is on the verge of being globally competitive.”