Not for the first time, Transnet chairperson Mafika Mkwanazi has stressed a desire for greater private-sector participation in the group’s R300-billion market demand strategy, and beyond. He reported last week that the board had mandated the executive to deliberate on ways to “optimise” the Transnet balance sheet and to “bring in other people, from a risk-sharing [and] private-sector-participation perspective”.

Some details should emerge in the next seven-year corporate plan, which is due to be approved internally in February, and should be outlined to the public by the middle of 2013.

Importantly, Mkwanazi is not out on a limb here, with even Public Enterprises Minister Malusi Gigaba (who is seen as something of an arch State capitalist) having repeatedly asserted that private balance sheets are needed to ensure that the financial constraints of the State-owned companies (SoCs) do not, again, undermine the government’s infrastructure ambitions.

In addition, Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe used the recent Presidential Infrastructure Summit to argue that the R4-trillion investment plan offered “countless opportunities” for partnership. He even called for a broad-based public–private “coalition” to support the infrastructure plan, which currently comprises 18 clusters of strategic integrated projects, comprising 645 individual work packages.

The problem is that the private sector has grown sceptical about such utterances and is, therefore, questioning whether government truly will facilitate a role for it, not merely in the building and operation of infrastructure developments, but also as owner.

This scepticism runs particularly deep in the embattled con- struction sector, which feels massively let down by the gaping chasm between infrastructure promises and actual delivery. But, while this anger and cynicism is more than justified, there is now something of a risk that self-pitying could morph into destructive navel gazing that results in opportunities being missed.

It’s early days yet, but there are signs that government is finally getting its head around ways to more fully integrate private skills, energy, innovation and finance into the infrastructure programmes.

The best evidence of this, I believe, can be found in the energy sector.

True, it remains dominated by Eskom and will for some time. But the National Treasury and the Department of Energy have, at last, put in place something of a practical framework for the integration of independent power producers (IPPs).

For the first time since the blackouts of 2008, South Africa has a regulatory and legal basis for the procurement of more than 15 000 MW of power from IPPs.

Should it be implemented as planned (and there is still a risk that it won’t), there is an opportunity for private enterprises to participate in the design, building, ownership and operation of plants worth billions of rands. Similar plans for private participation are likely to evolve in the transport sector over the coming years.

The key now, however, is to have some high-profile successes so that the private sector can truly start believing that there is infrastructure life beyond the activities of the SoCs.