Wild Coast road set to proceed in 2016
Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, Gugile Nkwinti made the announcement last week.
THE construction of the proposed new N2 Wild Coast toll road is expected to start in September 2016.
Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, Gugile Nkwinti made the announcement at a public consultation meeting in Bizana in the Eastern Cape last week, in his capacity as chairman of the Presidential Infrastructure Co-ordinating Committee (PICC) which is tasked with overseeing strategic infrastructure projects.
“We have made a decision. What we want to know now is where we are going to relocate people who have to make way for the road. In the case of graves, we want people to indicate where the graves will be relocated,” said Nkwinti.
Before construction starts, houses, graves, animal veld and mielie fields will be relocated to suitable alternative land.
“If court processes against the construction of the roll road persists, the project will start in 2017.”
The primary reason given for the support of the toll is based on the perception that the construction will provide employment opportunities.
The production team of the multi-award winning film The Shore Break, that puts the proposed Wild Coast titanium mining project in the spotlight, is watching with interest the reaction to the announcement of the toll road. “It is the belief of many community stakeholders that this announcement is a pre-cursor to the introduction of mining in the area,” said director/co-producer of The Shore Break, Ryley Grunenwald. “It is our belief that this new development flies in the face of the wishes of the majority of the community in that area,” she said.
Nonhle Mbuthuma, the protagonist in The Shore Break and co-spokesman of the Amadiba crisis committee, said: “We are not poor and we will not move from our land. We will not move for mining and we will not move for a four-to-six lane highway toll road. We demand an end to the efforts to deprive the Amadiba communities from legal representation. SANRAL argues that the area is one of the poorest in the country. When shall this stupidity stop? How can we be poor when we have land? We grow maize, sweet potatoes, terro yams, potatoes, onions, spinach, carrots, lemons, guava and we sell some of it to the market. We fish and we eat egg and chicken. This agriculture should be developed. We have cattle for weddings and traditional rituals… goats for ceremonies. We are not a part of the ‘one out of four South Africans who go hungry to bed’. We have a life.
The N2 highway toll road on our ancestral land is not for us and of course it is not for tourists. It makes it faster to drive from Durban to East London. It will support the plans of the Australian company MRC for open cast mining on a 22km x 1.5km stretch along the coast.”
In response to Minister Gugile Nkwinti’s announcement, eThekwini spokesman, Tozi Mthethwa said: “The council resolution on this issue still stands. (It) indicates that council does not support any more toll gates within the Metro region and this resolution has not been rescinded.”
In May 2014, chairman of the KZN Portfolio Committee of Transport, Mxolisi Kuanda told a committee that a decision had been taken at a strategic transport department meeting in Cape Town that no tolling would happen in KZN, in as far as the proposed toll road was concerned. “The proposed Isipingo toll road has been relocated to the Eastern Cape,” said Kuanda at the time. He said the province was already over-tolled.
