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Cape Town - A proposed road maintenance fund is likely to win favour, but questions remain over how it will be operated as current legislation does not make provision for ring-fenced funds such as this.
About R120bn is needed to maintain the country's roads, many of which have become riddled with potholes due to poor planning, with recent heavy rains having made the situation worse.
On Tuesday, Transport Minister Sibusiso Ndebele indicated that his department would either set up a dedicated road maintenance fund or adopt the creation of such a fund as policy.
A statement from the department of transport said that the minister, along with the provincial transport MEC, called for the "finalisation of a proposed ring-fenced multibillion-rand programme for the maintenance of South Africa's road network."
Democratic Alliance (DA) shadow transport minister Stuart Farrow welcomed the statement.
A source in the National Treasury, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that, while such a fund made some sense, the problem was that the Public Finance Management Act - the overarching law that governs state spending - does not make provision for ring-fenced funds.
"The way the Public Finance Management Act works is that all funds received, from taxes and levies, go into a centralised 'pot' and then are appropriated in the budget as part of government's spending priorities," the source said.
Farrow said the established Road Accident Fund receives its annual appropriation of about R35bn without much trouble.
"The point is that there are a lot of little taxes and levies that go into the funding government. Something can be done to either ring-fence the funds or condition the monies received to go back into maintaining roads," Farrow said.
Farrow's view is that the introduction of a dedicated road maintenance fund could help to ensure that provincial and local governments tackle serious road infrastructure problems, and that money is distributed systematically based on which areas need it the most.
