Joburg woes continue

The Johannesburg Roads Agency (JRA), an entity within the City of Joburg, is unable to produce asphalt at a R50 million plant it acquired in 2017.

As lockdown eased and the JRA began tackling an enormous pothole backlog, reports suggested that a “shortage of input materials” was to blame. This was not the case. The plant has not produced a single kilogram of asphalt for more than five months.

Launched with much fanfare by then-mayor Herman Mashaba in August 2018, the plant in Booysens was intended to “speed up service delivery”. But it has been plagued by breakdowns and “operational issues”.

A long-awaited report tabled to the city’s transport committee reveals that the “plant has not met any of [its] production targets”.

The original plan was so ambitious that the JRA projected it would be able to sell 30% of production “to projects at a price competitive with private asphalt suppliers”, which would aid its viability.

The report reveals that in the first year of operation (2018-2019), the plant only produced 68 655 tons of asphalt, far below its target of 150 000 tons.

That it managed to achieve 45% of its target in that year seems to have been commendable as the report notes the “underperformance of the plant has been the case in [the] second year (2019-20) and [the] first quarter of the current year (2020-21)”.

No further production data is provided, but given the increasing number of operational challenges, it is likely to have been far worse than just 45%.

In fact, the report says in July the plant was “not operational” for the whole of July “due to procurement challenges related to gas supply”. Beyond the specific issues in that month, it also says the plant has been plagued by “low pressure gas supply” which “impacts production rate”.

The usual twin problems in local government – “shortage of supply of materials and internal human resource challenges” – are also present. – Moneyweb