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A Sneak Peek Into South Africa’s ZAR 28.4 Bn Road Project

| August 6, 2019

After the upgrade of N3 and N2 freeways faced setbacks due to financial constraints, the project could soon come to fruition.

The long-awaited project is anticipated to cost ZAR 28.4 Bn and will take between five to eight years for it to be completed. It has been estimated that the project will create about 15,000 job opportunities.

South African National Road Agency (Sanral) has said ZAR 8.3 Bn worth tenders will be issued in the near future to begin the N3 upgrade project between Durban and Pietermaritzburg, an 80 km length.

The N2 upgrade will begin from Lovu River all the way to Umdloti in a 55km stretch.

Hardly a month ago, Sanral hosted hundreds of job seekers and entrepreneurs in an event where the state agency shared available job opportunities linked to the mega project.

“Sanral wants to share business and job opportunities and has made a concerted effort to ensure that youth, women, the disabled and other designated groups benefit from its projects, ” Dumisani Nkabinde, Sanral manager in the Eastern Region, said during the event.

Nkabinde highlighted that Sanral intends to ensure the growth of black-owned SMEs that fall under sectors relevant to the project. Reports indicate that the project will engage in business with companies that have at least 51 percent black-owned and with a minimum B-BEE Level 2 rating.

Sanral’s executive engineer Louw Kannemeyer said, “We are confident that this investment will help to boost the construction sector which has been under severe pressure in recent years, and also cascade down to black-owned and emerging enterprises who will receive much larger shares of tenders in future.”

Sanral noted that the roads will also be designed beautifully and strong enough to last in the coming decades.

He noted that several initiatives will be taken into consideration during the construction to improve general usability. Some of them include:

Sanral said several initiatives will be undertaken during the construction to improve the freeways’ usability, and safety, which include: Use of noise-reducing asphalt mixes to minimise noise made by tyres, use of geometric design to ensure the smooth flow of traffic, among others.

Once the project is complete, this is how it is expected to look like: