Although the government’s Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) is aimed at providing poverty relief and income through temporary work for the unemployed, the real potential for sustained employment lies in the maintenance of the associated projects.

This is according to Public Works Deputy Minister Jeremy Cronin, who was speaking at the EPWP Summit, held in Centurion, on Monday.

Over the last three-and-a-half years, the Department of Public Works has created about 2.5-million work opportunities through the EPWP.

“People tend to forget about maintenance and forget about these projects, which end up deteriorating. Maintenance needs to be ongoing and much of it is labour intensive,” Cronin said.

He noted that, often labour gets imported from other provinces for complex construction projects. “But, maintenance is local and ongoing and as we scale up, we could use the entire government infrastructure spend programmes and implement maintenance much more profoundly in sectors.

“We have massive maintenance problems in, for example, the water and sanitation sectors . . . typically as a result of lack of skills and the lack of regular maintenance. We have to push through the EPWP where huge possibilities lie,” Cronin said.

One such example was giving female-headed rural households the responsibility for maintaining a particular stretch of public road, such as the one that runs past their house, for about 1 km.

Other sectors that the EPWP could be expanded were the social services arena, such as basic security and greening the economy, which included retrofitting buildings, replacing light bulbs and solar water heater installations. These tasks were labour intensive and did not require a “whole lot of skills”.

Cronin added that training under the EPWP still needed more attention. “If someone is performing a task for 40 days, hardly any training has taken place. Therefore, we have to build training connections of all kinds to enable training. We have negotiated some R200-million with the Department of Education for artisanal training and hope to make more linkages in all spheres of government,” he noted.

Also speaking at the summit, Gauteng Infrastructure Development MEC Qedani Mahlangu said that South Africa’s most populous province, with its nearly 12.3-million inhabitants, was under a lot of pressure.

“The EPWP project is a very important intervention in uplifting the economy. For example, England had a similar intervention after the World Wars, with the government deciding that they were going to use massive infrastructure programmes to drive job creation. South Africa is not unique in this regard,” Mahlangu said.