SA businesses battered by infrastructure instability - Muhammad Ali

Infrastructure failure has become a core business risk in South Africa. In this interview with Chris Steyn, international ISO standards and systems implementation specialist Muhammad Ali warns: “...infrastructure is not just decaying, it's going down the drain to its limit’. He notes that while systems and standards exist, “it's just up to the right leadership, the right party to acknowledge and implement effectively”. Ali describes how Barcelona, for instance, has optimised service delivery with an App that connects citizens to municipalities “...they take a picture of that particular pothole and then the smart cameras verify and validate that that pothole is there. That particular ticket that gets logged in gets quickly sent out to the relevant community, the SMMEs and QSEs or contractors-to-be who are approved and vetted and validated to give a quotation on exactly who can do this work with the best price, the best quality, the best time. And automatically, without any human intervention, it denotes through a criteria of selection who the vendor is and issues them with an order. They are given three days to be able to complete this exercise with a picture and the camera validating this, and they are paid within seven days.” Meanwhile, back here “these syndicates and extortion in South Africa has become a movie. We're living in Hollywood and I think Hollywood is actually getting scripts from South African day-to-day lifestyles….So we've got a long way to go in terms of having the right leadership, having the right… accountability.”