The South African National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) says it is ready to implement R30-billion worth of construction projects.
Sanral engineering executive Louw Kannemeyer says the agency has a portfolio of projects that will be implemented during the course of the 2020/21 financial year and beyond.
“In the current financial year, Sanral has advertised 278 maintenance, operations and construction projects worth approximately R30.2-billion. So far, 136 projects to the value of R7.3-billion have been awarded.”
The agency also plans to roll out more than 200 additional road infrastructure projects across all nine provinces of South Africa.
That said, 12 projects with an estimated value of R12.1-billion had to be cancelled and retendered, owing largely to noncompliant bid submissions.
Sanral says this is one of the major contributing factors to the delay in awarding tenders.
“We recognise the frustrations of the industry and are engaging with regulatory bodies like [the] National Treasury on ways to streamline our procurement processes to make them more efficient and to ultimately speed up the process of adjudicating and awarding tenders,” says Kannemeyer.
“We can typically receive as many as 60 tenders for a single project, especially on Construction Industry Development Board 6 projects (less than R20-million), and all these are subject to various regulatory and compliance verifications to confirm that each bid is responsive.
“Some of these verifications involve external entities, resulting in numerous delays in finalising the processes.
“The challenges are exponentially compounded under Covid-19 lockdown regulations, as some of these entities are not functioning at 100% capacity yet,” notes Kannemeyer.