Bridge heroes show government how to get things done

When you drive along roads or over bridges in the Eastern Cape, you see something quite remarkable: An odd patchwork of infrastructure of bridges and roads so badly deteriorated that the communities who use them have given up on waiting for the government to do something and are making the repairs themselves.

Travel up Buffalo Pass into East London or along the Kayser’s Beach road and you see how those communities have collected gravel, stones, and mud to fill gaping potholes on those sorely maintained roads.

Daily Dispatch has repeatedly reported on bridges across the flood-ravaged Wild Coast, after several people including children have died, where villages have come together, often with the help of local businesses, to create makeshift structures to reconnect them to the province.

Today, we once again feature ordinary people, who, without proper resources, have rolled up their sleeves to do what the government has not.

Centane residents and taxi drivers came together, clubbing together what little funds they could, to make repairs to the Khobonqaba bridge where two people lost their lives in floods two weeks ago.

They even created bridge-side barricades to prevent further loss of life.

Last year, we also reported on how Masibulele Shuta Madikane borrows or rents equipment such as spades and wheelbarrows to repair the damaged R63 between Qonce and Stutterheim.

In some cases, the work earns these community warriors small donations, but in several cases these repairs are done using labour and funds from the community because they simply have no other choice.

They have been abandoned or neglected for so long that doing so is their only way to get to school, to work, to shops, or even to social grant paypoints so that they can feed themselves and their families.

In a province so mired in poverty and unemployment, roads and bridges are relied on to hold us together.

Without them, the people of the province, particularly the poor, are torn apart; cut off from education, income and opportunity.

Nine months ago, former roads and transport MEC Weziwe Tikana-Gxothiwe launched ex-transport minister Fikile Mbalula’s Operation Vala Zonke at Buffalo Pass, which was promised to be prioritised in the nationwide campaign to address potholes.

But no sign of any work having been done there can be found.

Were it not for the efforts of residents or nearby Newtown there would be little road to ride on. All the promises have turned to naught.

And, come election time, there will surely be more promises. But will they ever amount to action?

There comes a time when we have to ask ourselves why lives are being lost because of sheer and blatant inaction, and why our government is more concerned with public launches than actually getting its hands dirty.

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