South Africa’s roads are falling apart – and R35 billion doesn’t even come close to fixing the problem

Transport minister Blade Nzimande says that the Department of Transport is continuously engaging with National Treasury on its need to increase the budget allocation for roads maintenance.

This follows a recent parliamentary Q&A session where COPE’s Willie Madisha questioned the amount of money needed to improve the country’s infrastructure over the coming years, and what to expect from road infrastructure in the future.

In response, Nzimande said that there had been an increase in the budgets for national roads, citing a Sanral graph which shows that spending is set to rise as high as R20 billion by 2020/2021.

However Nzimande noted that there was difference between national and provincial road maintenance.

“In the case of provincial road maintenance, which are funded from their provincial budget allocations, the department shall continue to assist provinces through the Provincial Roads Maintenance Grant (PRMG), with an a estimated budget allocation of R35 billion over the current Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF),” he said.

According to Nzimande, the PRMG accounts for roughly half of provincial road maintenance expenditure, with the funds mostly used for routine and periodic maintenance needs.

“Hence, very limited resources are available to rehabilitate the provincial paved road network unless the PRMG is significantly grown over the medium to long term or provinces allocate a much larger portion of own funds to road maintenance – ideally a combination of both measures,” he said.

“The magnitude of maintenance backlogs due to lack of funding is such that it is unlikely to be addressed through national transfers and subsidies, especially given the National Treasury’s commitment to fiscal consolidation, which in the continued absence of notable economic growth must be predominantly realised through higher allocations from the provincial treasuries and/or from savings and efficiencies in respective provincial departmental expenditure.”

He added that where the emphasis in the earlier years was more on the existence of infrastructure, at present the emphasis is on ‘network availability’ and ‘redundancy’ predominantly.

“This requires a different asset management approach. Therefore, road authorities need to revisit their maintenance strategies by looking at the relationship between infrastructure and mobility, so that the range of optional interventions can be broadened, to extend the lifetime of road assets,” he said.

Financial support to provinces

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