Gravel roads vex drivers, no money for repairs

With the current rainy season still in its infancy, many gravel roads in the northern parts of the country are already in urgent need of re-surfacing and other costly maintenance activities.

The cash-strapped Roads Authority (RA) has admitted that a large number of these roads are in a bad state, but some will only be repaired during the 2018/19 financial year.

Recently the Oshana, Omusati and Ohangwena regions experienced heavy rainfall that has already seen some of their gravel roads being washed away, while some are too treacherous for vehicles to use freely. This represents a continued headache for motorists, who have to endure these often impassable paths on a daily basis, because there are effectively no alternative routes by which remote homesteads and areas can be reached.

Motorists, amid a continued economic crunch, inevitably end up spending their limited funds on fixing the vehicle damage caused by these gravel roads. The responsibility for constructing, upgrading and maintaining the country's roads lies with the government-owned RA, which awards tenders to companies that are then entrusted to construct and maintain this critical infrastructure. In previous years, the majority of the Namibia's roads were maintained by the Roads Contractor Company Limited (RCC), which is also a state-owned enterprise (SOE).

However, plans were set in motion last year to place the loss-making entity under a court-supervised rescue arrangement. This exercise, approved by Cabinet in September last year, is widely expected to wind up the affairs of the RCC in its current form, which may be replaced by a similar, yet more efficient, entity. RA CEO Conrad Lutombi explained in a recent telephone interview that the ongoing financial challenges being experienced by government, and by implication its SOEs, were the reason why gravel roads will remain a headache for motorists.

Lutombi acknowledged the fact that a large number of gravel roads across the country are in a bad state.

He indicated that the RA has deployed contractors involved in the grading of gravel roads, but some of them were beyond repair and needed to be regravelled.

Good gravel road maintenance or rehabilitation depends on two basic principles - the proper use of a motorgrader (or other grading device) and the use of good surface gravel.

“On the issue of the gravel roads, we have deployed all the contractors now for the grading of gravel roads, but some of the gravel roads require regravelling and that will only happen in the next financial year,” Lutombi said. He partly attributed the current state of the country's gravel roads to the troubled RCC, saying it had previously been responsible for the grading of these roads, which was part of the reason the RA had not extended the RCC's contract.

This then resulted in the RA seeking other companies to do the grading, before an open bidding process is launched. Lutombi said as much as the RA wants to maintain all the country's roads, it cannot do this with the limited resources it has at its disposal. He said currently the RA only has four gravelling units across the country and it needed at least, in order to carry out its mandate effectively.

“The fact of the matter is that most of our gravel roads need regravelling, the challenge we are facing is that of adequate funding. We really don't have enough funding to regravel all the roads,” Lutombi said.

He also spoke about the challenge of finding the best materials for the maintenance of the country's gravel roads, which were prone to be washed away during heavy rainfall.

Some of the currently damaged gravel roads were constructed only a few years ago.

KENYA KAMBOWE