In several countries, the development and management of public infrastructure assets are part of performance measures for which many elected or public officials are rated. Re-elections or employment retentions bear directly to how well these assets are functional, and their reliability-based response to the needs of residents and visitors.

In such places, an infrastructure’s longevity memorializes it into a historical asset that defines a town’s identity, or as a welcoming visage to herald a new comer; they tend to adorn many public information profiles or publications as signature façade.

Our local experience is different: With many infrastructure assets, we still face a paucity of effective and efficient asset management programmes.

Our asset management plans, if they exist, have been missing in its operation and maintenance actions for far too long. Majority of these assets, publicly owned and operated, are being left to fall into disrepair and become hazards or life-threats to their patrons. Even some of the landmarks among them, unwittingly, have become obsolete or faded into antiquity.

As part of a business process, on which governance is anchored, we need functional asset management plans, detailed in a systematic, step-wise manner for the various public utilities and infrastructure that are designed or implemented by our governments.

We need a plan that tracks public assets, monitors and schedules maintenance, identifies and rates defects, intelligently determines timelines for repairs, rehabilitation and upgrades, and that will direct asset operation in an optimal, cost-effective manner. That will serve as part of an overall public infrastructure sustainability programme. The overall programme, typically, would aim at sustaining the required level of service that users need, and for which each asset was originally intended to provide, at its lowest lifecycle cost.

Agencies and organizations such as the European OECD, and the American AASHTO, EPA, or FHWA have all determined that it is through proper asset management that governments can improve infrastructure programmes and quality, increase information accessibility and use, enhance and sharpen decision-making, make more effective investment and cost decisions, including the social and economic impacts of asset failures, while delivering the service levels customers desire. As a customer, the citizen is king.

Majority of our critical public infrastructure is in dire need of asset management: transportation (highways and bridges, rail transit systems, airports and seaports), utilities (potable water supply and sewerage systems), and power generation (transmission and distribution), etc, are good examples.

It is needful for a thorough and comprehensive evaluation of this publicly-owned portfolio of infrastructure assets to be done, such that the public receive value for investment, as well as generating historical data that propels long-term, logical decision-making process. That is the fulcrum on which infrastructure asset management revolves in other parts of the world.

If we have a reliable, comprehensive infrastructure database, structured according to various asset modules, we can then very easily develop meaningful programmes for their asset management. We would also be able to factor in our lowest lifecycle costs, or rather, the “best appropriate cost for rehabilitating, repairing, or replacing” each of our known assets.

We would not wait, say, when a major highway bridge collapses, as currently being feared for the Niger Bridge at Onitsha, or the pavement failures of our arterial roadways, made worse by the plugging of the storm drainage systems in our municipalities, before a proactive plan is in place. Aside other governmental constraints, the absence of workable plans explain why the previously functioning potable water systems, in our towns, fell into disrepair. There is really no excuse not to implement workable programmes for infrastructure sustainability and management by our governments.

Asset management of our infrastructure must go beyond the traditional maintenance practices of today. It must aim at incorporating variants of public-private partnership programmes (4Ps). For example, some of our transportation or water treatment and supply assets can, at least, retain the services of reputable, fully bonded and well-insured vendors to bid and manage them.

They need not be local. Absent heavy-duty political considerations and undue influences, say, if company ‘A’ fails in its work, then the supervising MDA can contractually demand that the bonding agency undertake and execute the contract as originally intended. And there must not be any recourse to third-party influences including the various Governors Lodges for any form of partisan alternate dispute resolution.

Our planners must confront the basic needs of our landmark bridges, overpasses and motorways strung across our national landscape. Let us face reality here: concerted efforts are really needed to prolong the asset life of our infrastructure through a well-oiled programme that focuses on the upgrades, repairs, and routine stocking and re-stocking of asset components needed for service life renewal schemes.

The effectiveness of any asset management programming in place today can easily be gleaned from the current state of our infrastructure. Perhaps we need to refine our current best practices to guide efforts at all levels of government. First, let us have a national, comprehensive asset inventory and system map for each sector of our economy that is renewable at specific periods, or every time an upgrade or new asset is in place. And this must easily be accessible to planners in each MDA.
Second, each MDA must design and develop a system-specific, condition assessment and rating system for each asset type.

The highway systems can adapt and customize the U.S. FHWA rating system for its local use, or fashion out a comprehensive, home-grown needs assessment protocol. Thirdly, we must have a realistic asset renewal scheme, tracked according to zones or states, or even asset type. This would then drive the development of alternative strategies for managing the operations and maintenance of each asset and its location, manpower and capital budgeting needs.
Fourthly, we need to project ahead by predetermining asset-specific, baseline service life.

This will take our MDAs away from a reactive maintenance mode to one of proactive management and planning wherein repairs, rehabilitation or upgrades are predicted ahead of schedule and, perhaps, below budget. Fifthly, we must determine our specific funding sources for our critical asset needs. Reliance on periodic governmental, fiscal allocations must be de-emphasized, and an investment or, user-funded programme(s) evaluated for their feasibility and adoption. The era of big brother holdouts must be minimized by deploying resources based on asset conditions and lifecycle costs.

And finally, we need to assess the timeline at which the remaining useful life of each asset calls for automatic replacement plans. Obviously, a weighted-cost and benefit evaluation of upgrades versus replacement decision must be made. We cannot continue to wait for asset failure as the trigger for action especially in this era of tremendous advances in technology.

We ought to target our asset management plans to identify all critical assets that sustain the economy and thereby make resource allocation decisions that are tied to sustainable levels of service. The objective is to reap the benefits of asset management that prolong asset life, tracks repair and replacement schedules, and improves the efficiency of operations and maintenance decisions.

These will meet local user demands by focusing on system sustainability, and any user fees and rates can then be justified. A complete picture of the economic costs needed and the revenue generation that can be planned for will become easier to decipher. Otherwise, why must our national infrastructure, such as the hydroelectric power plants, be allowed to become obsolete? Any economy that operates in darkness surely must be in the Dark Age.

Ihekwaba writes from United States