South Africa's electricity distribution sector urgently requires a centrally-funded asset recovery plan to deal with a serious maintenance and investment backlog that continues to grow yearly, an industry veteran appealed on Thursday.

Willie de Beer, the former COO of the now defunct EDI Holdings, said the maintenance and refurbishment backlog had increased to R27,4-billion by 2008, owing to ongoing restructuring uncertainties, under-investment and a dearth of skills.

But he also contended that the backlog was probably still growing at a rate of about R2,5-billion a year, despite recent moves by some municipalities to begin recapitalising their system.

Speaking at an Infrastructure Dialogues panel discussion in Midrand, Gauteng, he warned that unplanned outages were rising across the country and would continue to increase unless and until a turnaround plan was finalised and implemented.

Displaying a slide showing unplanned outages for an unnamed large municipality, he showed that between March 2005 and March 2010 he number of unplanned outages had risen to an average of more than 100 a month, well in excess of planned stoppages for maintenance.

An asset recovery and expansion plan would require an investment of about R60-billion, which De Beer said should be invested over 10 rather than five years, primarily to take account of the skills deficits and vacancy rates at the municipal level.

This investment and funding plan should be centralised, while implementation should be decentralised and implemented by fully ringfenced and properly regulated entities. Such a programme could generate 3 700 jobs and play a large in building a new cadre of engineers, artisans and technicians.

Energy Intensive User Group chairperson Mike Rossouw warned that it could take 20 years to return to a decent state of repair, owing to the prevailing skills and funding constraints.

He appealed for the restructuring process, which was being reconceived following the abandonment of the six wall-to-wall regional electricity distributor model, to prioritise service delivery and for the new model to embrace cross-boundary delivery, or to allow private operators to deliver the 'requisite' service. Those unable to deliver the requisite service should lose the licence to operate.

Buffalo City municipality GM for electrical and mechanical services Sy Gourrah calculated the unfunded backlog within the Eastern Cape municipal area was currently R680-million.

She expressed frustration at the inadequacy of both funding and skills and the fact that her department did not have the flexibility to develop packages to retain individuals with scarce skills, many of whom were leaving not only for the private sector, but to pursue more lucrative prospects abroad.