Africa-Press – South-Africa. The Road Agency of Limpopo (RAL) needs R138 billion to upgrade all gravel roads in the province, and at current funding levels, it would take 115 years to tar.
“Rough estimates show that the Road Agency of Limpopo (RAL) needs a total of R138 billion to upgrade all gravel roads in the province… At the current funding level for road upgrades, it will take approximately 115 years to clear the current backlog,” said the agency in its March 2021 Performance Plan, according to a GroundUp report.
However, RAL, the provincial state-owned agency tasked with the planning, designing, construction, management, controlling and maintenance of provincial roads, said it had prioritised to tar 3 793km of the province’s 13 828km gravel roads.
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This was 27% of the province’s gravel roads and would cost R37 billion.
But the road upgrade budget for the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 was only R1.27 billion.
Yet, across the province, many villagers had been waiting since the dawn of democracy for their roads to be tarred. Only 31% (6 263km) of Limpopo’s roads had been tarred.
RAL intended to prioritise roads in the Capricorn district, because the province had for years overlooked road infrastructure in this district. Gravel roads in the district, which include villages such as Mphahlele, Senwabarwana and Zebediela, were in extremely bad condition.
In the village of Zebediela, for instance, a section of Rakgoatha has a main road so bad that residents have to use other roads to go about their business.
Tefo Nthlane, a resident of Ga-Rakgoatha, a village with a population of 6 179 in the 2011 census, said:
The Rakgoatha gravel road (D3608) starts and connects from the tarred road of Makweng village, and then moves across all sections until it connects to the R158 (the Lebowakgomo route), which takes people to the nearest work places and shopping centres.
From Rakgoatha to Lebowakgomo shopping centre is a 15.7km distance, about a 20 minute drive, but due to the poor condition of the road, many motorists and taxis use the Moletlane tarred route which is 22km long.
The road is potholed, has no drainage system and high grass on the verges.
For years, residents of Rakgoatha hoped that RAL, which took over the operations of the province’s roads from the district municipalities in 2000, would tar the road.
Nthlane said:
The condition of the road also affected the local school. Pupils from Befful section, whose primary and secondary schools are at the other end of the road, sometimes stop going to school because the summer rains make the road impassable.
A tribal official, who declined to be named, said: “The road was supposed to have been tarred years ago because we were once told by senior officials from the municipality that the road had been allocated a budget.”
To makes matters worse, villagers complained that Lepelle-Nkumpi local municipality had tarred a street that runs past the house of a former ward councillor before tarring the main road.
But the councillor had support for the project and it is a busy road.
When asked whether the community of Rakgoatha would have their roads tarred any time soon, RAL spokesperson Maropeng Manyathela said: “All decisions for upgrading of roads are taken by the provincial government based on the province’s strategic imperatives and needs. Those decisions are then communicated to RAL by the MEC.”
According to RAL, it needed R2.8 billion to complete prioritised incomplete roads of 289km; R3.9-billion to fund the paving of 397km of roads categorised as “prioritised political commitments”; and needed to source R10 billion to finance prioritised 1 004km of road paving projects “in hotspots”.
*Ezekiel Kekana is an Open Society Foundation Fellow at Wits University.
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