The South African National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) has been pulled in to improve delivery on the R22-billion S’hamba Sonke (Moving Together) provincial and municipal roads maintenance programme, which is due to run until 2014.

Transport Minister Sibusiso Ndebele acknowledged on Tuesday that only R1.7-billion had been spent on the projects since the programme’s launch in April last year, well short of the R6.4-billion allocated for the 2011/12 fiscal period.

Such underspending was part of a broader theme within the public sector, with Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan estimating earlier that only 68%, or R178-billion, of the R260-billion set aside for infrastructure in 2010/11 was actually spent as planned, owing to weaknesses in the State’s infrastructure capacity.

Sanral had been mandated to lend its engineering and project management support to the programme, for which R7.5-billion had been allocated for 2012/13 and a further R8.2-billion in the year thereafter.

But the backlog remained large, with Ndebele estimating it at R169-billion, or about 500 000 km, adding that the worst-affected areas were typically those outside of the urban nodes of Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town.

“We need to reverse this uneven development,” he said at a briefing of the Infrastructure Development Cluster, which he chairs.

The upcoming Presidential Infrastructure Summit would interrogate various funding models, including the ‘user-pays’ model, to address the backlog.

“As South Africans we need a dialogue on how we will pay for this,” he said, stressing that there could be no repeat of the backlash that had been associated with the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP) and the associated e-tolling system.

The public outcry over e-tolling led Gordhan to announced a special appropriation of R5.8-billion to Sanral to help it reduce its GFIP debt and enable it to reduce the tariff to 30c/km, capped at R550 a month for motorists.

He said lessons had been learned, but South Africa still needed to reach consensus on how it would pay for the second phase of the GFIP, as well as other urban highway projects in Cape Town.

Work was also under way to close any possible law enforcement loopholes that could stymie the implementation of e-tolling, which was due to begin on April 30.

An amendment to the Transport Law Enforcement and Related Matters Act was being prepared to cover e-tolling and would serve before lawmakers soon.

However, opposition remains, with the Congress of South African Trade Unions moving ahead with its anti-tolling protest action and a number of other motoring and vehicle owners’ bodies weighing their legal options.