By Nhlanhla Zondo, Sales Director, Power Process Systems (PPS)
Across much of the African continent, power and control infrastructure does not fail because it is poorly designed. It fails because it is too often designed for ideal conditions that simply do not exist.
Engineers and operators are required to work within an environment shaped by infrastructure vandalism, material theft, harsh weather conditions, constrained capital budgets, unreliable grids, and persistent skills shortages. In this context, traditional assumptions about asset replacement, digitalisation, and imported solutions are increasingly being challenged.
What is emerging instead is a more pragmatic engineering philosophy, one that prioritises resilience, adaptability and longevity over novelty. At the centre of this shift is a growing recognition that Africa’s infrastructure challenge is not merely about building more, but about making existing systems smarter, tougher and more maintainable.
When replacement is not an option
In many mature industrial and municipal environments, full system replacement is neither financially viable nor operationally prudent. Capital expenditure is tightly constrained, while downtime carries significant social, safety and economic consequences. As a result, refurbishment and life-extension strategies are becoming essential engineering tools rather than budget compromises.
Targeted refurbishment of existing assets such as mini-substations, distribution kiosks, and control panels allows utilities and industrial operators to address safety, reliability, and security risks without the disruption and cost associated with complete rebuilds. By upgrading enclosures, renewing critical internal components, and integrating modern monitoring capabilities, infrastructure can be stabilised and modernised incrementally.
This approach reflects a broader shift in thinking: performance gains do not always require wholesale replacement, but rather intelligent intervention based on a deep understanding of operating context.
Designing for vandalism, theft, and environmental stress
One of the defining characteristics of African infrastructure environments is that physical security is not optional. Theft of copper components, vandalism of kiosks, and unauthorised access to live electrical equipment remain among the leading causes of outages, safety incidents, and revenue loss.
In response, physical hardening has become a core design principle rather than an afterthought. Structural reinforcement, intelligent access control, and the removal of scrap value from components are increasingly embedded into enclosure and distribution system design. This is not merely about protecting assets, but about safeguarding communities and ensuring service continuity.
Material selection plays a crucial role in this context. Moving beyond conventional mild steel, engineers are increasingly adopting corrosion-resistant and high-strength materials better suited to humidity, dust, temperature extremes, and coastal conditions. Although such materials may carry a higher upfront cost, they significantly reduce lifecycle expenditure by extending service life and lowering maintenance demands.
Local manufacturing as a resilience strategy
Global supply chain volatility has reinforced an insight long understood by African engineers: local manufacturing is not just an economic advantage, but a reliability strategy. Local production enables tighter control over quality, faster response times, and the ability to customise solutions for highly specific operating conditions.
It also reduces exposure to shipping delays, currency fluctuations and long lead times for replacement components, factors that can severely undermine system uptime in critical installations.
By retaining manufacturing, testing, and refurbishment capabilities close to the point of use, companies can reduce mean time to repair (MTTR), maintain legacy systems long after imported components become obsolete, and respond rapidly to unforeseen failures. In constrained environments, responsiveness is often as important as technical sophistication.
Digitalisation must sit inside hardened infrastructure
Digitalisation and automation are accelerating across African industries, driven by the need for improved efficiency, predictive maintenance and energy optimisation. However, the success of these initiatives depends on a fundamental but often overlooked reality: digital systems are only as reliable as the physical infrastructure that protects them.
Remote monitoring platforms, smart meters and IoT devices offer little value if sensors can be stolen, communication modules vandalised, or enclosures breached. As a result, a layered design approach is gaining traction, one that integrates digital intelligence within physically hardened systems.
This approach allows operators to monitor asset health, energy consumption, and fault conditions in real-time, while ensuring that the underlying hardware remains secure and operational. Importantly, it also supports incremental digital upgrades, enabling legacy systems to be brought into modern monitoring environments without the need for complete replacement.
Incremental modernisation over wholesale change
A growing number of clients are prioritising modular, scalable upgrades over large-scale system replacements. This reflects both economic reality and operational pragmatism.
Incremental modernisation allows organisations to spread capital expenditure over time, minimise operational disruption, demonstrate early performance gains, and retain compatibility with legacy infrastructure.
By focusing on component-level upgrades, intelligent retrofits and phased implementation, infrastructure owners can improve safety, efficiency and reliability while maintaining flexibility to adapt as technologies evolve.
This strategy also reduces the risk associated with rapid technological change, ensuring that investments remain relevant even as control philosophies, communication standards, and automation platforms continue to develop.
Skills as critical infrastructure
Beyond hardware and software, Africa’s infrastructure resilience challenge is fundamentally a human one. A shortage of mid-level engineers with experience spanning both legacy mechanical systems and modern digital control environments poses a growing risk to system sustainability.
Local manufacturing environments that integrate design, fabrication, assembly and testing serve as powerful training grounds for developing this hybrid skillset. Mentorship, apprenticeship programmes and structured youth employment initiatives play a critical role in embedding technical knowledge within local contexts.
When skills development is treated as a strategic investment rather than a compliance exercise, it strengthens long-term system performance by ensuring that infrastructure can be maintained, adapted and upgraded locally, without perpetual reliance on external expertise.
Engineering for reality, not ideal conditions
Africa’s industrial growth will not wait for perfect conditions. Infrastructure must function in environments defined by constraint, complexity and unpredictability. The most successful engineering solutions emerging today are those grounded in realism, solutions that acknowledge vandalism as a design variable, capital scarcity as a constant, and adaptability as a necessity.
By prioritising refurbishment over replacement, embedding digital intelligence within physically secure systems, investing in local manufacturing and skills, and designing explicitly for real operating conditions, the continent’s power and control infrastructure can become more resilient, more sustainable and better aligned with its realities.
At Power Process Systems (PPS), these principles increasingly inform how locally engineered control, distribution and automation solutions are conceived, manufactured and deployed, not as isolated products, but as part of a broader systems-thinking approach to Africa’s infrastructure future.
