The Minister of Transport Sindisiwe Chikunga conducted a site inspection of the multibillion-rand bridge under construction along the R573 Moloto Road in the Thembisile Hani Local Municipality, Mpumalanga on Monday.
This visit was part of ongoing efforts by the government to assess progress of critical infrastructure projects and ensure their timely completion.
Minister also helped local construction site workers and patched the road.
The multibillion-rand road project link Gauteng, Mpumalanga and Limpopo.
Minister Chikunga was joined by the leadership of the Municipality, CEO of SANRAL Reginald Demana, key stakeholders and officials involved in the projects to provide valuable insights and recommendations for their successful implementation.
Construction of the first phases of the upgrading of R573 Moloto Road, a 137km stretch from Gauteng to Mpumalanga and Limpopo.
The project officially started in 2015.
The South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL) has invested R3.7-billion in the project over a period of five to six years.
“I’m very happy and I’m impressed, and I can see that SANRAL is managing this road very well.
In this case when we talked about infrastructure, we refer to rail infrastructure, road infrastructure and aviation infrastructure.
When we talk about the infrastructure development, we mean project such as this one and that is why we taken time and come and see if there is work progress particularly on this one road,” said Minister of transport Sindisiwe Chikunga addressing the media at the construction site in R573 Moloto project.
Minister Chikunga explains that this road used to be a provincial road, connecting three provinces.
There were many accidents happening in this road and a number of people dying on this one road.
The road was bad, and we decided to intervene and hand over the road to SANRAL for construction and better maintenance.
“We are going to erect the high mass light so that there is light on this road, we will put warnings to separate the two lanes to ensure the safety of the road,” explain Chikunga.
Minister said that they will be closing some of the illegal access because some cause accidents and this will happen as part of these projects.
The minister indicated that the high number of trucks on the country’s roads remains a problem and the Freight Logistics Road Map, which was approved by Cabinet in 2023, seeks to address immediate challenges in the logistics system.
“We are very happy and impressed that there is progress in this project and there is no space for mafias, and we report this to minister of police because for us is criminality nothing less or nothing more,” she said.
Chikunga concluded that that we have created number of jobs opportunities, lots of skills, women, young people and some of the engineers that could not graduate got their experience here, and we able to graduates working from this project.
The road infrastructures bring investment it enables us to access the areas of economic, towns, schools, health and it’s important that we maintain this at the highest level and ensure that our people are able to benefit out of that.
“This is a real engineering excellency that we have in South Africa, and we did not import anyone we use our engineers, and this is what they are producing.
We request the community around to ensure that this project is never disturb and any delay in infrastructure project is not without cost and it’s very costly,” she said.
“This road it will no longer be called death road but a people road and this is one of our Moloto roads projects. We are building a bridge.
The important about this some of this project especially bridges we are trying lift the roads to create enough capacity for water to flow through.
The project was not moving at the time but now the project is moving, and we have made lots of progress in this project and we are very proud to see the work of amount that has taken place,” said CEO of SANRAL Reginald Demana.