Skew lines on national highway are temporary, roads agency says

When Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) CEO Wayne Duvenage posted screenshots from a video showing skew traffic lines painted on a road, people responded with a combination of anger and apathy at another government tender apparently gone horribly wrong.

“More government decay. When your municipality and provincial authorities outsource road-marking to friends and family, probably at three times the price. Will someone be held accountable? You bet not,” Duvenage said in a tweet last week.

However, the SA National Roads Agency (Sanral) told TimesLIVE last week that the lines on a stretch of the N2 national highway in the Eastern Cape’s Kouga municipality were only temporary and would be painted according to specifications once roadworks were completed.

The screenshot Duvenage posted was an extract from a two-minute video in which a driver comments about the state of long stretches of the N2 highway before Humansdorp, where the lines seemed to have been painted by hand.

Sanral spokesperson Vusi Mona said the project in question was a reseal contract.

“The section of road is a reseal project. The white lines are temporary and will be sealed over. After the reseal new traffic lines adhering to the specifications will be painted when the project is completed,” said Mona.

Transport minister Fikile Mbalula recently had to field questions from citizens across the country who were enraged about the state of the country’s roads and transport infrastructure.

Heavy rains during summer wreaked havoc on roads in the northern provinces. Residents posted pictures and videos in the comment section of many of Mbalula’s tweets showing the state of roads in their part of the country.

In some cases residents claimed the damage is years old.