Pretoria - The South African National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) on Friday hosted an engagement session with the business community of Limpopo.
The engagement session, held with various business organisations and formations, focused on road infrastructure development.
Sanral’s Northern Region Manager Ismael Essa gave delegates at the session an overview of the agency’s role and mandate and what impact Sanral has on improving South Africa’s road infrastructure network.
South Africa has an extensive road network of about 750 000km, the tenth longest network in the world. Sanral is currently managing a national road network of about 21 403 km, of which 84% are non-tolled and only 16% are tolled, privatised and state-owned.
Essa highlighted the extent of Sanral’s involvement in the province, due to the fact that 1 628km of road in Limpopo has been added to the agency’s network, making it a total of 3 550km in the province.
In March, the agency announced that it was taking over 1 628km of Limpopo’s roads at the request of the province.
The management and maintenance of such a network cost Sanral in the region of R775 million in the current fiscal year, and the projected costs are not expected to be below half a billion rand by 2018. This means that a lot of money still needs to be injected in Limpopo to improve and modernise its roads network.
“Currently Sanral is spending millions of rands in the province to improve the N1 Ring Road around Polokwane, the Musina Ring Road as well as the Mokopane Northern Ring Road,” said Essa.
Essa said apart from such a massive cash injection in the modernisation of roads in Limpopo, Sanral is also extremely concerned about the safety of road users, including pedestrians.
“We are currently running a number of road safety campaigns in the province, including the building of bridges over highways, to ensure that community members who live close to such roads are not killed while trying to cross them,” he said.
Sanral was also proud that an increasing number of roads in Limpopo were being transferred by the provincial government to the agency.
He said the agency was well-positioned to manage such huge roads infrastructure because of the human skills at its disposal as well as the agency’s technical know-how. It also showed increased confidence in Sanral as a reliable state agency, said Essa. – SAnews.gov.za
