South Africa could spend billions connecting people to the internet and still fail to deliver a truly digital economy. However, municipalities must maintain the infrastructure underneath it.
That may sound like an odd claim in an industry obsessed with fibre, spectrum, 5G and data centres. Yet connectivity does not float above the physical world. Fibre needs roads, servitudes, electricity, water, poles, ducts and functioning municipal systems.
When those systems deteriorate, the digital economy starts paying the price. The problem is not that a pothole will stop someone from opening a website. Instead, a municipality that cannot maintain its basic infrastructure often cannot efficiently support the infrastructure that makes digital services possible. It cannot efficiently approve, protect or expand that infrastructure either.
Municipal failure becomes digital risk
This is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Government itself has acknowledged that many municipalities struggle to maintain roads, water and electricity infrastructure. Moreover, they lack the technical skills and resources needed to provide basic services. National Treasury’s latest municipal expenditure figures show the financial pressure behind the problem.
By December 2025, municipalities had spent only 35.6 percent of their R78.9 billion capital expenditure budget for 2025/26. Meanwhile, consumer debt had reached R467.2 billion, while outstanding municipal creditors stood at R160.8 billion.
This is not simply a local government problem. It creates an environment in which every infrastructure intensive industry, including telecommunications, faces greater cost, delay and uncertainty.
Fibre depends on functioning municipalities
Telecommunications operators depend on municipalities in ways that are easy to overlook. A fibre network needs permission to cross roads, access municipal servitudes and use public infrastructure.
It also needs roads that operators can safely excavate and reinstate. Furthermore, it needs electricity to power network equipment and secure sites. Finally, it needs municipal teams to process applications, inspect work and protect infrastructure once operators install it.
South Africa’s own Operation Vulindlela has identified the streamlining of municipal wayleave applications as part of the country’s digital reform agenda. That is an important admission – the speed of digital infrastructure deployment is partly determined by the quality of local government processes.
The consequences extend beyond fibre rollout. When water, electricity, roads and public facilities become unreliable, businesses face higher operating costs. They also face greater disruption. Meanwhile, telecommunications companies face additional costs when infrastructure is repeatedly damaged, relocated or made inaccessible.
Construction becomes more expensive when roads and public spaces have to be opened and repaired repeatedly. And where municipal electricity distribution is weak, network operators must increasingly build redundancy into their own operations.
The result is a subtle but significant drag on investment. Instead of capital being directed towards expanding connectivity into underserved communities, more of it is consumed managing the consequences of infrastructure failure.
Digital government meets physical reality
There is another problem, and it is particularly relevant as South Africa pushes towards digital government. The country is no longer simply trying to get people online. It is trying to move essential services online. Operation Vulindlela’s digital transformation programme is intended to create a more integrated digital government, including digital identity, real time payments and data exchange.
That ambition assumes reliable connectivity at the point where citizens interact with the state. A digital service that depends on a municipal building with unreliable electricity, damaged access infrastructure or inadequate connectivity is not much of a digital transformation. It is simply an analogue bottleneck with a website attached.
This is why municipal infrastructure maintenance should be treated as part of the country’s digital infrastructure strategy, not as an unrelated public works issue. South Africa already has more than 200,000 kilometres of terrestrial fibre, while government is using SA Connect to extend connectivity to millions more households and public facilities.
The Department of Communications and Digital Technologies reported that SA Connect had provided broadband to 1.8 million households by March 2025, with an ambition to reach 5.5 million households by the end of 2026. Every additional kilometre of network and every newly connected household increases the importance of having local infrastructure capable of supporting, protecting and maintaining that investment.
Plan physical and digital together
The answer is not to ask municipalities to become telecommunications companies. It is to recognise that digital infrastructure must be planned alongside physical infrastructure. Road upgrades should consider fibre ducts and future network requirements.
New developments should incorporate connectivity from the outset. Municipalities should standardise wayleave processes, maintain accurate infrastructure maps and create predictable approval systems.
National government, provinces, municipalities and operators should also share infrastructure wherever practical instead of repeatedly digging up the same roads. Parliament has already called for greater collaboration between government entities and the private sector to avoid duplication of broadband infrastructure. That same principle needs to extend into broader municipal planning.
Maintenance is digital investment
South Africa’s digital future will not be decided solely by who wins the next spectrum auction or builds the biggest fibre network. It will depend just as much on whether the country can maintain the physical systems that allow those networks to operate and expand.
Connectivity is now infrastructure, and infrastructure has a maintenance problem. If policymakers want higher internet penetration, faster digital transformation and a more competitive economy, they need to stop treating municipal maintenance as yesterday’s problem.
Fixing a road, replacing a leaking pipe or improving a municipal approval process may not look like digital investment, but increasingly it is. The fibre running through that road does not care which department’s budget paid for the repair. It only needs the road beneath it to keep working.
Matone Ditlhake | CEO | Corridor Africa | mail me |
