While Johannesburg is supposed to be a hub city for cargo redistribution and is currently trying to put on a show for the upcoming G20 Summit in Sandton, its internal logistics network has a serious infrastructure headache.
Some 900 bridges across the city are said to be in urgent need of structural care and rehabilitation, with at least 68 reported to be seriously dilapidated.
But Johannesburg Road Agency CEO, Zweli Nyathi, has said the city has an inspection backlog and capacity constraints are hindering the City Council to address its derelict road infrastructure.
In a radio interview on Hot FM, Nyathi said: “One needs to understand that Johannesburg is probably a hundred years old.
“We all know that vandalism is on the rise. People are making fires under bridges and people are scrapping for scrap metals.
“We have heavy traffic and our railways are not working, so we have all these external factors that are affecting our infrastructure.”
As the city prepares for the last big gathering of heads of state for 2025, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent admonishment of Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi over the general state of Johannesburg seems to have borne fruit.
But the street cleaning and sudden spurt of pot-hole filling is not going to assist the city’s road freight logistics in the long term.
It would take roughly 25 years to restore Johannesburg’s roads and the council did not have the necessary resources to identify where the most pressing infrastructure need was, said Nyathi.
