Traditionally, cash for fixing roads has been dished out on the basis of the number of vehicles travelling up and down that stretch of bitumen or concrete or gravel. After all, roads with lots of people travelling on them are clearly roads that are important to the economy. Right?
Not quite, warns Samson Muradzikwa, a rural development economist from the University of Cape Town.
Interesting off-the-beaten-path research by Muradzikwa, an associate with the respected Southern Africa labour and development research unit at the university, suggests that taking better care of remote and dusty roads that will never see a luxury German sedan, let alone a traffic jam, can help grow an economy where almost none survives.
His findings have serious implications for the Western Cape, which is buckling under the pressure of 80 000 people fleeing rural poverty every year. If better roads revitalise the rural economy, that might take some of the pressure off the Mother City.
The problem is that the Eastern Cape, the original source of many of Cape Town’s poorest inhabitants, has some of the worst roads in the country. Muradzikwa once took a bone-jarring ride in a four-by-four along the notorious Amadiba road in the rural north-east portion of the Eastern Cape. It took eight long hours for him to travel just 45km.
”It was painful because it was very slow. We were driving over rocks; we were driving through water,” remembers Muradzikwa, who can claim to be a genuine Cape-to-Cairo pan-African with a Mozambican wife, a Zimbabwean father, an Egyptian mother and a birth near the River Nile, although he has studied and worked in Cape Town for a dozen years.
”You could see multiple earth tracks stretching off into the distance because as one part of the road deteriorated too badly, people just made a new version a little further away.”
Investment
But the Pinelands resident’s work has led him to the conclusion that investment in roads like the Amadiba route can be a worthwhile decision.
”This road goes through the Mtentu region, a very poor area in a very poor province,” says Muradzikwa, who worked closely with Mac Mashiri of the Built Environment Group at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria on the project. ”The unemployment levels are upwards of 75%.”
Using the current worldwide model of fund allocation for road repairs, which requires that high traffic volumes should justify upgrades, the stony, bumpy Amadiba road would never be improved.
Muradzikwa’s argument is that other factors need to be taken into account. Never improving roads in the Eastern Cape ”may encourage more rural-urban migration”, he warns. ”We are trying to curb that.”
The earth road was upgraded using poverty-relief funds from the South African National Roads Agency. Ditching the machinery-intensive upgrading programmes in favour of using community labour — a key feature of the expanded public works programmes studied by his colleague Anna McCord at the University of Cape Town — can also improve roads at no extra cost while providing the cash-strapped rural economy with a bit of a kick-start.
”A blacktop road usually costs about R1,4-million per kilometre. This couldn’t be justified for a rural road. Gravel is much cheaper than bitumen, which requires particular chemicals and technologies. In fact, in this case, we were able to use local gravel, which saved even more money,” Muradzikwa reveals.
”The idea was just to get the Amadiba road into workable condition, according to the CSIR consulting engineers, so we wanted to use labour-intensive methods. In fact, about 70% of our nearly R10-million project went into wages.”
Boost for local economy
The wages were not great, but made a great difference spread out among the 1 700 working villagers.
”People worked on transforming the road from earth to gravel for no more than a year,” explains Muradzikwa. ”Our surveys of villages along the route show that a lot of money earned from working on the road was spent on food and clothes, which is not surprising given the extent of poverty in the area.
”People spent the money within their local economy, so the money didn’t leak out to the cities, which is good news in itself.”
But, he adds, a lot of the wages revitalised the local agricultural economy, as the former road workers bought horse-drawn plows, fertiliser, seeds and rakes. Cash-strapped schools also benefited, as about a quarter of the wages went to pay school fees.
The community retains responsibility for the road, which stretches from a turn-off on the coastal N2 highway to another turn-off en route to the regional hub of Bizana, which means that the improvements do not require constant infusions of precious tax rands.
”Several households from the initial project were given a wheelbarrow and shovel by the municipality and maintain their bit of road in exchange for a small income,” says Muradzikwa.
”Each household has about 300m of road that they are responsible for. They have to fill in potholes which form during the rainy season, remove pebbles and clear the drainage on the sides when bad weather hits, so the villages are not cut off from each other after storms.”
Spin-offs
But there’s more. Smoothing out the ruts in the roads jump-started the local economy in more ways than just a one-off injection of wages.
”Five months after the road was completed, it was a different ball game compared to the original road,” remembers the senior lecturer in economics. ”More crops were being grown in the area, many more spaza shops had opened, bicycle repair shops had opened and we saw people cycling up and down, and there was generally far more social and economic activity.”
Although the repair work had created short-term jobs for people in the village, the increased traffic flows meant that more produce was going to market as isolated villages connected with the outside world.
The beneficial spin-offs even extended to education, with more children enrolling and attending schools as transport became easier.
”These are benefits that wouldn’t normally be captured in a strict engineering model,” says Muradzikwa, who interviewed people in about two dozen villages within 1,5km of the Amadiba road for his research.
Now the affable 30-year-old wants to extend his research, originally funded by the civil and structural engineers at the South African Bitumen Association as well as the CSIR, into the economics of road repairs even further. This week, he was in Johannesburg to meet potential sponsors for the next phase, comparing projects in Zambia and a young but worthwhile project in KwaNgwanase near the KwaZulu-Natal border with Mozambique.
In the meantime, the Amadiba road is barely recognisable.
”It used to take seven to eight hours to travel. Now it takes two to three hours.” says Muradzikwa. ”Taxi drivers used to only drive the first 8km of the road because it was so risky, so people who lived further on had to walk. Now the taxis do the entire route. And there’s a bus service, which wasn’t there before.”
All of which means that the small shop owners and schoolchildren living within shouting distance of the Amadiba road may not be forced by desperation to abandon their roots for the squatter settlements around Khayelitsha. So, what works in a remote part of the Eastern Cape might be very good news for the Western Cape as well.
Muradzikwa will be speaking on Thursday from 1pm on All You Need Is Roads: Rural Development Progress in South Africa and Zambia as part of the free Centre for Social Science Research 2005 seminar series, at the upper campus of the University of Cape Town. More information: [email protected] or Tel: 021 650 5117