The first phase of nine kilometers, from Woestalleen to Pan Bridge, will also be widened to accommodate four lanes.<\/p>\n
According to the municipality, the dangerous alternative route which has no emergency lanes of cambers, will be overhauled completely.<\/p>\n
The year-long project is set to finalized by January, after kicking off at the start of the year with the establishment of a road side laboratory testing site for quality control purposes.<\/p>\n
The local community of Sikhululiwe (the former Mafube Village), will be trained in laboratory operations and road testing.<\/p>\n
To date, 48 people, of whom 35 are local, have been employed.<\/p>\n
Mpefumelelo Business Enterprises has been appointed as main contractor, while local contractors have been sub-contracted to provide water tankers and equipment for the project.<\/p>\n
Pan bridge will also be widened and culverts replaced.<\/p>\n
Despite the state of the road, traffic is surprisingly dense with mine and agricultural vehicles, as well as trucks.<\/p>\n
“The speed with which these vehicles criss-cross the basically non-existent road, is frightening,” municipal communications officer, Mr Emmanuel Tshehla, told the Observer, adding that stop-and-go points will definitely be introduced to manage existing traffic for both motorist’s and contractor’s safety.<\/p>\n
The DA, who’ve been pressurizing the province to rebuild the road for the past two years, have welcomed the project despite a number of postponements.<\/p>\n
DA member of parliament, Mr Anthony Benadie, who resigned as the party’s Mpumalanga leader two months ago, says the department availed altogether R425 million from 2013\/2014, 2014\/2015 and 2015\/2016’s budgets to rehabilitate the road from Middelburg to Wonderfontein, comprising 22km in total.<\/p>\n
The project would have started in November 2013 and finished in August this year, but even before the project was set to start, it was marred by a number of delays due to financial shortfalls.<\/p>\n
“Though we welcome the reconstruction of the road, the DA is a bit worried about the constant change in plans from the department’s side, chopping and changing the phases of the project, and commencement dates of work,” Mr Benadie told the Observer.<\/p>\n
He says that the road reconstruction would have a positive economic impact on the town, since no alternative routes than the N4 were available.<\/p>\n
\u2022Apart from the road upgrades, 83 new RDP houses have been built for the elderly and disabled from Sikhululiwe and surrounding farms.<\/p>\n
The project was handed over the the municipality for inspection on 23 April and the official handover is set to take place in September.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After 17-years of pleading, the department of roads and transport has finally availed R95 million to rebuild nine kilometers of the old Belfast Road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":29529,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"hasGravity":false,"cxt_article_byline":"Gerhard Rheeder","cxt_disable_google_ads":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news-headlines"],"category_labels":{"Category":"News","SubCategory":"Local news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29528\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}