The South African National Roads Agency (Sanral) has told Parliament it will not meet its 30 November target for awarding 241 routine road maintenance tenders worth an estimated R9.5 billion. The Sanral road maintenance tenders are being run route by route after a court threw out the old panel. Acting chief executive Lehlohonolo Memeza confirmed the miss at a tense briefing of the Portfolio Committee on Transport on 29 September, Polity reported. Contractors and consultants who want the work are bidding package by package, and the timetable has slipped.
How the tenders got here
Sanral originally invited bids on 29 November 2024 for a five-year panel of 20 contractors to do routine maintenance across the national road network. About 401 tenders came in and 20 bidders were recommended, Freight News reported. The panel replaced a system of about 251 contractors. In July, after Sanral reviewed its own awards, the Pretoria High Court set the panel aside. Business Day reported that BCB Solutions and Botle Ba Afrika Roads had challenged the decision to reject their bids.
Sanral’s own account of what went wrong is specific. Memeza said: “Our review identified several procurement failures, including tender boxes not being opened within the required timeframe, the tender opening register not being made available to bidders and a selection criterion introduced during evaluation that was not in the original tender.” Sanral also acknowledged that the panel was appointed without price competition, with contractors selected on functionality.
Its chief legal, risk and compliance officer, Kaiser Khoza, put the legal risk plainly in July: “one material irregularity throws out a tender.” Outgoing chief executive Reginald Demana said the agency had been “ill-equipped to enter into panels” and would return to individual open tenders.
What is in the market now
Sanral is running 132 contractor tenders and 109 consultant tenders, staggered across 241 packages. Consultant tenders began on 14 August and contractor tenders on 11 September. About 70 contractor tenders are already open. Sanral says it staggered them to avoid overwhelming tendering capacity, driving up prices or letting a small number of companies win too many awards.
Routine maintenance covers pothole repairs, drainage upkeep, road markings and guardrails, according to Freight News. To keep that work going, Sanral had extended existing contracts until 30 November. It now says it will approach the courts for permission to extend some of them on a month-to-month basis. Memeza told the committee that internal audit and legal teams are reviewing each stage of the new process “to prevent a repeat of the failures that led to the original panel being set aside.”
What it means for smaller contractors
A 20-firm panel closed the door on everyone outside it for five years. Individual tenders reopen it, package by package. That is our reading of the change, not a claim in the reports, but it follows from the structure: each package is now a separate competition, and Sanral has said it wants to avoid too many awards landing with a few companies.
The failures Sanral listed are the ones a bidder can check for. A tender opening register should be available to bidders, and the criteria used in evaluation should be the ones in the original tender. The July judgment shows what happens when they are not.
The risk on the other side of the ledger is timing. Contract extensions are a stopgap, and the plan to seek month-to-month court approvals signals that Sanral does not expect a clean handover on 30 November. A contractor whose current extension ends then cannot count on a replacement award landing on the same day.
The committee is not finished
Lawmakers raised concerns about discrepancies between figures presented at the briefing and earlier replies to parliamentary questions, and about the lack of detail on consequence management. Memeza, who is new to the acting role after Demana stepped down at the end of August, has 14 days to answer the committee’s questions in writing.
Road spending has been a running question in our own coverage. The Transport Minister said road funding is up 167% while conditions worsen, Johannesburg’s roads agency says it needs R10bn now and gets R570m a year, and we spoke to Thobani Ndlovu about the construction mafia, tenders and the 30% rule. The Sanral reset will decide how much of the national network’s routine maintenance work goes to which firms over the next few years.
