Can we really make money out of our police stations?

The government is planning something quite audacious and it isn’t a high speed train from Tshwane to Durban. Instead it wants to create, out of the often dishevelled mass of land and property it owns through the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure, a national property company worth some R155bn … and it’ll be open to, indeed it’ll depend on, private investment. DPWI minister Dean Macpherson tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that “We have to find a mechanism to do something to protect the underlying value (of the State’s assets). If you wanted to put it on a graph, you'd have an inclining maintenance backlog and a declining property value. And those two are going to intersect at a point where if a decision isn't made quickly the damage may become irreversible. And government may have anything between a R30bn and R50bn hole on it balance sheet due to these collapsing buildings."