The South African National Roads Agency SOC Ltd or SANRAL is a South African

parastatal A state-owned enterprise (SOE) is a government entity which is established or nationalised by the ''national government'' or ''provincial government'' by an executive order or an act of legislation in order to earn profit for the government ...

responsible for the management, maintenance and development of South Africa's proclaimed National Road network which includes many (but not all)

National National may refer to: Common uses * Nation or country ** Nationality – a ''national'' is a person who is subject to a nation, regardless of whether the person has full rights as a citizen Places in the United States * National, Maryland, c ...

("N") and some Provincial and

Regional In geography, regions, otherwise referred to as zones, lands or territories, are areas that are broadly divided by physical characteristics (physical geography), human impact characteristics (human geography), and the interaction of humanity and t ...

("R") route segments.

History

SANRAL was created by ''The South African National Roads Agency Limited and National Roads Act, 1998'' as a corporatized successor to the South African Roads Board, which was part of the

Department of Transport The Department for Transport (DfT) is a department of His Majesty's Government responsible for the English transport network and a limited number of transport matters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that have not been devolved. The d ...

. It was registered as a

public limited company A public limited company (legally abbreviated to PLC or plc) is a type of public company under United Kingdom company law, some Commonwealth jurisdictions, and the Republic of Ireland. It is a limited liability company whose shares may be fre ...

on 19 May 1998. In 2011, SANRAL became the target of popular resentmen

as tolling was about to commence on many of SANRAL's freeways in Gauteng, in order to finance their soon to be completed expansions, as part of the first phase of the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project

The GFIP was instituted to deal with the severe traffic congestion in

Gauteng Gauteng ( ) is one of the nine provinces of South Africa. The name in Sotho-Tswana languages means 'place of gold'. Situated on the Highveld, Gauteng is the smallest province by land area in South Africa. Although Gauteng accounts for only ...

's freeway

Governance

SANRAL's only shareholder is the state, represented by the Minister of Transport (South Africa), Minister of Transport. The agency is governed by an eight-member Board of Directors. Five voting membersthe

chairperson The chairperson, also chairman, chairwoman or chair, is the presiding officer of an organized group such as a board, committee, or deliberative assembly. The person holding the office, who is typically elected or appointed by members of the grou ...

and four othersare appointed by the Minister of Transport for a term of three years. Two government officials are non-voting members, one from the Department of Transport and nominated by the Minister of Transport, and the other from the National Treasury and nominated by the

Minister of Finance A finance minister is an executive or cabinet position in charge of one or more of government finances, economic policy and financial regulation. A finance minister's portfolio has a large variety of names around the world, such as "treasury", " ...

. The

Chief Executive Officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especial ...

, who is appointed by the Minister of Transport on the recommendation of the Board, is '' ex officio'' a non-voting member of the Board.

Operations

SANRAL had 178 employees. They are divided between the head office and four regional offices: Northern Region (

North West The points of the compass are a set of horizontal, radially arrayed compass directions (or azimuths) used in navigation and cartography. A compass rose is primarily composed of four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west—each sepa ...

Limpopo Limpopo is the northernmost province of South Africa. It is named after the Limpopo River, which forms the province's western and northern borders. The capital and largest city in the province is Polokwane, while the provincial legislature is ...

and Mpumalanga); Western Region (

Western Cape The Western Cape is a province of South Africa, situated on the south-western coast of the country. It is the fourth largest of the nine provinces with an area of , and the third most populous, with an estimated 7 million inhabitants in 2020 ...

and Northern Cape); Eastern Region ( Free State and KwaZulu-Natal); and Southern Region ( Eastern Cape). In 2009 the agency managed a total of 16,170 kilometres of roads, and by 2014, more than 22,000 kilometers. SANRAL's operations are divided into two broad categories, namely toll roads, which are self-funding, and non-toll roads, which are funded by transfers from the Department of Transport. In 2014 toll roads constituted 14% (c. 3,000 km) of its responsibilities, and non-toll roads 86% (c. 19,000 km). Some toll roads are concessions, privately funded and managed with supervision from SANRAL; these include the

Platinum Highway The Platinum Highway is part of the N4, and a major South African highway built under concessions with a private contractor. In 2001, the project was voted Infrastructure Deal of the Year by Project Finance International Magazine. It took eight ye ...

( N1/ N4), the

Maputo Corridor The Maputo Corridor is a major trade corridor which connects the Gauteng, Limpopo, and Mpumalanga provinces of South Africa with Maputo, which is a port and the capital of Mozambique. The corridor comprises roads - including the N4 toll road (from ...

(N4) and the N3 Toll Concession. Other toll roads are owned and operated directly by SANRAL; these include the

Huguenot Tunnel The Huguenot Tunnel is a toll tunnel near Cape Town, South Africa. It extends the N1 national road through the Du Toitskloof mountains that separate Paarl from Worcester, providing a route that is safer, faster (between 15 and 26 minute The ...

, the Tsitsikamma Toll Road, the N2 tolls on the KwaZulu-Natal coast, and the N1 tolls in the Free State and Limpopo. It also owns and operates toll roads which are not National Routes (but are Provincial Routes), with an example being the Brandford Toll Plaza on the R30 section of the R30/ R730/ R34 ZR Mahabane Highway north of

Bloemfontein Bloemfontein, ( ; , "fountain of flowers") also known as Bloem, is one of South Africa's three capital cities and the capital of the Free State province. It serves as the country's judicial capital, along with legislative capital Cape To ...

Contributions to Palaeontology and modern science

In the mid-1980s, a road bypass was constructed around Grahamstown (now Makhanda), to prevent traffic between Port Elizabeth and East London from driving through the

townships A township is a kind of human settlement or administrative subdivision, with its meaning varying in different countries. Although the term is occasionally associated with an urban area, that tends to be an exception to the rule. In Australia, C ...

following

Apartheid Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...

uprisings (which were progressively getting more heated at the time), making it unsafe for motorists. In 1999 the newly constituted SANRAL tendered for upgrades of an unstable road cutting along this route. This road cutting contained an important 360 million year old fossil site previously researched by Dr Robert W. Gess. In 1999 SANRAL teamed up with Dr Gess to assist with salvage blocks of a black shale from the cutting to prevent their loss to science. This and further salvage of shale blocks during further work on the cutting by SANRAL contractees in 2007-2008, and their subsequent ongoing excavation, led to the revelation of the now world renowned Waterloo Farm lagerstätte, the only estuarine fossil site in the world from about 360 million years ago, with exceptional soft-tissue preservation. A few of the note-worthy fossils from Waterloo Farm include those of the first four-legged creatures (tetrapods) from Africa - '' Tutusius umlambo'' and '' Umzantsia amazana,'' as well as many other vertebrates such as Placodermi (eg. ''

Bothriolepis ''Bothriolepis'' (from el, βόθρος , 'trench' and el, λεπίς 'scale') was a widespread, abundant and diverse genus of antiarch placoderms that lived during the Middle to Late Devonian period of the Paleozoic Era. Historically, ''B ...

africana;

Groenlandaspis ''Groenlandaspis'' is an extinct genus of arthrodire from the Late Devonian. Fossils of the different species are found in late Devonian strata in all continents except eastern Asia. The generic name commemorates the fact that the first specimen ...

riniensi''), Acanthodii (eg. '' Diplacanthus acus),'' Chondrichthyes ''(eg. Antarctilamna ultima), Actinopterygii'' and Sarcopterigii (eg. '' Serenichthys kowiensis''). Agnatha included the worlds oldest fossil lamprey (''Priscomyzon riniensis''), the recently described juvenile which overturned our assumptions about vertebrates ancestry. The site has also revealed invertebrate remains including the scorpion '' Gondwanascorpio emzantsiensis'', the oldest land animal from Gondwana, and a diverse flora of plants including '' Archaeopteris notosaria'', Africa's earliest woody tree. In addition to numerus undescribed taxa and those currently being described (Housed at the Devonian Ecosystems Lab, Albany Museum, Makhanda), Dr Gess and his team still has decade's worth of work ahead from the excavated blocks that were rescued from the road works with the help of SANRAL.

References

External links