Chairperson, the DA celebrated when the Minister announced the formation of the dedicated Road Infrastructure Maintenance Fund, as we had been calling for it for many years in this House. It is a well-known fact that the public out there do not know who is responsible for fixing potholes or a bad road, or whether they are on national roads, provincial roads or even the rural roads that the hon Bhengu referred to. The dedicated Road Infrastructure Maintenance Fund, if it had been properly managed, could have allowed for these funds to be allocated to each province and local authority on a proportional and prioritised basis, based on, according to this document, some form of classification.
However, Deputy Minister, we have a dilemma. We are sitting with a backlog of R140 billion on our national and provincial roads alone; we have municipalities and metros that do not have sufficient funds or basic services, never mind for road maintenance; and we have a mass of toll loans that need to be settled. If this project of R23 billion had been applied properly, which we had a look at when we went and visited the sites, these monies would have gone down to the municipalities and they could then have been effectively used to fix up the rural roads which are in such a state of disrepair.
How then, Deputy Minister, with all these aspects, are you now going to fund this departmental backlog and the needs in the rural communities for the medium and long term and how do you intend monitoring these funds to ensure that the programme is applied by the book? [Time expired.]