Regimes of Inequality? A Focus on Road Infrastructure in Rural Eastern Cape Province,South Africa

Abstract

This paper examines the deteriorating rural road infrastructure in South Africa’s Eastern Cape as a manifestation of a regime of inequality, rather than a conventional service delivery failure. Drawing primarily on the South African Human Rights Commission’s 2023 inquiry, the study analyses how infrastructural neglect impairs constitutional rights to health, education, mobility and dignity. Integrating centre–periphery theory, durable inequality and infrastructural violence, the paper demonstrates how uneven investment, fiscal underspending and bureaucratic inertia perpetuate apartheid-era spatial hierarchies under democratic governance. It further demonstrates how road decay materialises as slow, embodied harm in everyday rural life. Finally, the paper highlights community-led road repair initiatives as forms of insurgent infrastructure that challenge state abandonment and reimagine infrastructural citizenship.

Keywords

Regimes of inequality road infrastructure rural South Africa spatial control centre-periphery

Introduction and background

The deteriorating road networks of South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province are more than mere indicators of poor service delivery; they exemplify how infrastructure functions as an institutionalised system of spatial control. Far from being passive victims of underdevelopment, rural communities in this region navigate an actively maintained regime of inequality where crumbling roads enforce profound economic marginalisation, social exclusion and political disenfranchisement. This regime manifests most acutely in former apartheid homelands like the Transkei, where a stark disparity persists: only 9% of roads are paved compared to a national average of 25% (South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), 2023). This infrastructural neglect directly correlates with the province’s enduring status as South Africa’s primary labour reserve, reproducing apartheid’s spatial hierarchies under democratic governance. As Todes and Turok (2018) argued, these deteriorating road conditions perpetuate structural and symbolic violence, exacerbating economic marginalisation, social exclusion and cultural disempowerment.

This paper addressed three interlinked questions central to understanding this crisis: First, how do road infrastructure conditions in rural Eastern Cape perpetuate historical regimes of inequality under democratic governance? Second, through what bureaucratic and fiscal mechanisms does the state sustain these spatial injustices? And third, what forms of community resistance emerge to challenge this infrastructural violence? The crisis extends far beyond engineering failures, representing systemic violations of constitutional rights. For instance, when ambulances require 4 hours to reach clinics in Mbizana Local Municipality during rains, or when 63% of schools in Joe Gqabi District report term-time closures due to impassable routes (Department of Basic Education, 2023), these are not isolated incidents but systemic denials of rights under Sections 27(3) (access to healthcare) and 29(1) (right to education) of the Constitution. The 2022 Provincial Transport Budget’s allocation of R2.1 billion to urban ‘economic corridors’ versus a mere R380 million for rural maintenance (EC DoT, 2022) further reveals a neoliberal continuity with apartheid’s spatial planning – a pattern this paper terms infrastructural coloniality.

Drawing on centre-periphery theory, this paper argued that potholed roads are not accidents of underdevelopment but active instruments of spatial control. They sustain three intersecting inequalities: economic extraction, which positions rural areas as labour reserves; political exclusion, evidenced by underfunded municipalities, and social abandonment, manifested through denied access to essential healthcare and education. The analysis delves into how a regime of fiscal apartheid is perpetuated through underspending on rural grants and the alarming idleness of critical road maintenance equipment, imposing a significant ‘mobility tax’ on the rural poor through inflated taxi fares. Furthermore, the paper examines how neoliberal spatial engineering, exemplified by the N2 expansion project, diverts crucial funds from rural access roads, exacerbating labour control through increased mine recruitment from roadside villages and sustained long commutes, thereby validating Tilly’s (1998) durable inequality theory.

However, this paper also highlights the emergence of powerful grassroots resistance. Instances like the Ncora Farmers’ Collective farms, shopkeepers and taxi drivers from Cathcart and Stutterheim regions of the Eastern Cape began repairing roads themselves in 2012 (Burgess, 2012). This demonstrates how communities engage in material subversion, legal leverage and discursive shifts to challenge state neglect, exemplifying Simone’s (2004) concept of people as infrastructure. Ultimately, the paper concludes that roads in the Eastern Cape serve as a profound archive, documenting both apartheid’s spatial violence and the post-1994 neoliberal betrayal. It reveals infrastructure as a governance technology, resistance as a blueprint for decolonial alternatives and the promise of redress enshrined in Section 25(5) of the Constitution as an unfulfilled constitutional fiction. This study aims to contribute to a broader conversation about what it means to live with dignity in the post-apartheid era and what is required to make that promise a reality for all South Africans, regardless of their location.

The Eastern Cape remains one of South Africa’s poorest provinces. Historically marginalised through the apartheid government’s homeland system, areas such as the former Transkei and Ciskei were policy-driven urban bias, denied investment in infrastructure and spatially disconnected from economic hubs. These structural legacies persist in post-apartheid South Africa, manifesting in severe infrastructure backlogs. The SAHRC’s (2023) Inquiry into the Human Rights Implications of Poor Road Conditions in the Eastern Cape provides an evidence-based, community-centred account of this crisis. The Inquiry reveals that less than 10% of the Eastern Cape’s roads are paved – far below the national average of 25%. This gap is not just a statistic; it is a lived reality for millions of people who are cut off from schools, hospitals, police stations and employment opportunities. As Fobosi and Malima (2025) highlighted through their focus on communities such as Hlankomo, Mdeni and Upper Tsitsana, poor road infrastructure restricts access to essential services, thereby deepening historical and spatial inequalities.

Poor road infrastructure in the Eastern Cape is deeply interwoven with the spatial and economic geography of inequality in South Africa. Drawing on the SAHRC’s findings and academic literature, such as Fobosi and Malima (2025), among others, this paper adopts a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the problem, integrating human rights law, urban sociology, public policy and development studies. It argues that the current state of road infrastructure violates multiple constitutional rights, including the right to education (Section 29), the right to access healthcare (Section 27), the right to security (Section 12) and the right to freedom of movement (Section 21). These violations are not isolated, or coincidentally, they are systemic, cumulative and preventable.

In rural areas, the consequences of poor road infrastructure are most acute. Communities like Mantlaneni, Gcibhala, Zigudu and Gwatyu, among others cited in the SAHRC report, illustrate the real-world implications of infrastructural neglect. In these villages, roads are frequently impassable during the rainy season. Learners are unable to reach schools, emergency medical services are delayed or diverted, police cannot respond to crimes and sick residents are often carried on foot over long distances to the nearest accessible clinic. Pregnant women give birth en route to hospitals and deceased loved ones are transported on makeshift stretchers due to the inaccessibility of hearses. These conditions are not only undignified, but they are also unconstitutional. Fobosi and Malima (2025) further conceptualise these impacts as forms of economic, social and cultural violence, which manifest through limited access to services, community isolation and the reinforcement of hierarchical power structures.

The situation is equally dire in the province’s urban peripheries. Areas such as Mdantsane, Motherwell and Zwide are densely populated townships situated on the outskirts of urban centres like East London and Port Elizabeth. Despite being integral to the province’s economy, these spaces are characterised by underinvestment in social infrastructure, including roads, public transportation and basic services. Poor road conditions in these areas result in significant mobility constraints, particularly for those reliant on the minibus taxi industry, the backbone of South Africa’s informal public transportation system. When roads are riddled with potholes or rendered impassable, taxis either avoid routes entirely or increase fares to cover maintenance costs. The result is a vicious cycle of exclusion and expense for commuters who can least afford it.

Moreover, poor road infrastructure has a crippling effect on local economic development. Agricultural and tourism sectors, pillars of the Eastern Cape’s rural economy, are particularly vulnerable. Farmers in regions such as Tsitsikamma, Alexandria and Langkloof often struggle to transport their produce to markets or ports, resulting in significant revenue losses. The tourism industry in scenic destinations like Hogsback has similarly suffered. Inaccessible roads deter tourists, reduce footfall and lead to the closure of local businesses. Amathole Tourism Association, in its submission to the SAHRC, reported a 30% decline in bed-night bookings, a figure that translates into lost jobs, lower municipal revenue and diminished livelihoods (SAHRC, 2023).

The absence of road maintenance also affects state capacity and institutional performance. Departments such as Health, Education, Transport and Police Services are unable to deliver on their mandates. Emergency vehicles break down, healthcare equipment arrives late and scholar transport programmes are halted or delayed. The Eastern Cape Department of Transport (EC DoT) has conceded that no new capital road projects will be undertaken until 2044 due to fiscal constraints – an admission that exposes the profound lack of planning and prioritisation at the provincial level. Meanwhile, municipalities are expected to maintain local roads despite lacking the requisite funding, technical expertise and equipment. The Provincial Road Maintenance Grant (PRMG), designed to support road infrastructure development, is often underutilised or mismanaged. Fobosi and Malima (2025) further highlighted the issue of governance inefficiencies, including the lack of accountability among contractors, which results in projects being abandoned or suffering from substandard work.

The consequences of these failures extend beyond the physical. They are psychological and symbolic. For many residents, the lack of decent roads is experienced as a denial of state presence, a form of abandonment that erodes trust in government institutions and deepens feelings of alienation. It reinforces the notion that some lives are less valued than others, that rural black South Africans are still relegated to second-class citizenship nearly three decades into democracy. This is particularly distressing when viewed against the backdrop of South Africa’s constitutional democracy, which promises equality, dignity and redress.

This paper presents three central arguments. First, the poor road infrastructure in the Eastern Cape constitutes a structural and systemic violation of human rights, rooted in both historical injustices and present-day governance failures. Second, the impacts of this infrastructural crisis are multidimensional, affecting not just mobility and access, but also public health, educational outcomes, economic opportunities and social cohesion. Third, urgent, coordinated and adequately funded interventions are required at national, provincial and local levels to rectify this situation. These must include improved planning mechanisms, greater intergovernmental collaboration, transparent monitoring systems and stronger community engagement.

In tackling this topic, the paper foregrounds the voices and experiences of those most affected. It draws on the testimonies collected during the SAHRC Inquiry, community-led initiatives in road maintenance and policy submissions from civil society organisations such as the Public Service Accountability Monitor and the Trust for Community Outreach and Education. It also incorporates academic insights from urban sociology and transport economics to highlight how the state of roads intersects with broader patterns of exclusion, underdevelopment and resistance.

Ultimately, this paper positions the road infrastructure crisis in the Eastern Cape not as an isolated service delivery failure but as a mirror of South Africa’s enduring inequalities. It challenges policymakers, development practitioners and legal scholars to reframe roads as a matter of justice, not merely engineering. By doing so, it aims to contribute to a broader conversation about what it means to live with dignity in the post-apartheid era and what is required to make that promise a reality for all South Africans, regardless of their location. This paper further reframes road neglect in the Eastern Cape through the lens of infrastructural violence. From this perspective, infrastructure is not merely a background condition of development but a material site through which state power is exercised and social hierarchies are organised. Road decay, deferred maintenance and uneven investment operate as technologies of governance that normalise exclusion and produce differentiated forms of citizenship. In rural contexts, this violence is slow, cumulative and embodied, shaping everyday experiences of risk, exhaustion and isolation rather than appearing as discrete policy failures.

This paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 provides a detailed background on the historical context of road infrastructure development in the Eastern Cape, with a particular focus on the legacy of apartheid-era underfunding in former homelands, such as the Transkei. Section 2 presents the study’s methodological approach, highlighting the use of site observations, qualitative interviews and photographic evidence to document the challenges faced by rural communities. Section 3 analyses the profound socio-economic and human rights implications of poor road infrastructure, discussing how it limits access to essential services and perpetuates various forms of violence, including economic and social violence. Section 4 delves into the economic impact on the agricultural and tourism sectors. Finally, the paper concludes in Section 5 by presenting key findings and offering recommendations for transformative infrastructure policies and accountability measures that aim to address systemic inequality in the province.

Theoretical framework: anatomy of an inequality regime

This paper adopts Charles Tilly’s (1998) theory of durable inequality as a conceptual lens to examine the systemic neglect of road infrastructure in the Eastern Cape. Tilly posits that inequality persists when categorical differences – such as spatial hierarchies between urban and rural areas – are embedded in institutions and reproduced through organised processes. His framework reveals how infrastructural neglect is not incidental but a deliberate mechanism of control, sustaining apartheid-era spatial inequalities under democratic governance.

The utility of Tilly’s theory lies in its ability to expose the institutionalisation of inequality. In South Africa, this is evident in the institutionalised neglect of rural roads, a practice rooted in apartheid’s homeland policies (Addleson and Tomlinson, 1987) and perpetuated through post-1994 neoliberal spatial planning (Adebayo and Todes, 2003). The Eastern Cape’s road disparities – where only 9% of roads are paved compared to 25% nationally (SAHRC, 2023) – exemplify what Barca et al. (2012) term place-based deprivation, where geographic marginalisation is reinforced by policy inertia.

However, Tilly’s framework faces challenges in accounting for resistance. While he emphasises institutional reproduction, scholars like Amin et al. (2003) argue that spatial inequalities are contested through grassroots mobilisation, as seen in the Ncora Farmers’ Collective’s road repairs. Similarly, Alexander et al. (2012) demonstrate how marginalised communities challenge structural violence, complicating Tilly’s deterministic view.

Moreover, Tilly’s focus on categorical inequalities risks oversimplifying intersectional oppression. Altman (2001) and Andersson and Musterd (2005) demonstrate how rural neglect intersects with race, class and gender, as women bear a disproportionate burden of mobility (SAHRC, 2023). This aligns with Bhorat and Mayet’s (2013) critique of one-size-fits-all development policies, which ignore localised disparities.

Ultimately, Tilly’s theory provides a vital lens for diagnosing infrastructural apartheid, but it must be supplemented with critiques of neoliberal spatial governance (Bek et al., 2004) and frameworks that centre on agency, such as Simone’s (2004) concept of people as infrastructure. By integrating these perspectives, this paper reveals road neglect as both a product of durable inequality and a site of resistance. Under apartheid, the Bantustan system deliberately underdeveloped the rural Eastern Cape to serve as a labour reserve, allocating only 17% of transport budgets to homelands despite housing 40% of the population (Lipton, 1977, 89; Addleson and Tomlinson, 1987: 225). Post-1994, neoliberal policies like the Spatial Development Initiatives (SDIs) diverted resources to urban corridors, exacerbating rural neglect (Adebayo and Todes, 2003: 12; Altman, 2001: 34). Municipal IDPs consistently classify rural roads as low priority, despite serving 68% of the province (SAHRC, 2023: 47).

Applying this to infrastructure, the rural road crisis is not merely the result of technical or fiscal limitations but the expression of a deeply entrenched spatial ordering that privileges urban cores over rural peripheries. In this context, road infrastructure becomes a political technology that codifies marginality and reinforces a tripartite regime of inequality: material control, bureaucratic violence and symbolic exclusion.

First, the material control dimension refers to the institutionalised neglect of rural roads, which reinforces spatial immobility. Gravel roads dominate rural landscapes in the Eastern Cape, with 91% of provincial roads remaining unsurfaced, according to the SAHRC (2023). These roads are particularly vulnerable to weather-induced degradation and often become impassable during the rainy season. The EC DoT’s (2022) own data acknowledges that 37% of rural roads require full reconstruction after each seasonal cycle. This cyclical decay should be understood not as an unintended engineering failure, but as a mode of governance through which exclusion is organised and normalised (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012). Infrastructural breakdown, in this sense, is productive: it structures who can move, who can access services and who remains exposed to risk. Statistics South Africa (2023) reports that rural households spend up to 22% of their monthly income on transport, nearly triple the national average. This economic burden, described in this paper as a mobility tax, systematically penalises rural livelihoods, restricting access to schools, clinics, markets and legal services. It also constrains labour mobility, deepening the province’s role as a peripheral labour reserve for urban economies and reinforcing apartheid-era patterns of geographic exploitation.

Second, bureaucratic violence operates through institutional mechanisms that maintain rural infrastructural neglect under the guise of formal planning. Municipal integrated development plans (IDPs) consistently categorise rural access roads as low-impact infrastructure, despite serving 68% of the provincial population. This classification effectively prioritises urban expansion over rural maintenance. 89% of municipal road committees in the Eastern Cape lack representation from rural wards, silencing the voices of those most affected by road degradation. This exclusion is compounded by fiscal bottlenecks: the Provincial Roads Maintenance Grant (PRMG), intended to support local infrastructure, is chronically underspent. In 2022, R14.7 million earmarked for rural road repairs went unused due to alleged capacity constraints, as detailed in the SAHRC report. Such inefficiencies are not neutral – they are a form of administrative violence that erodes rural agency and reproduces inequality through procedural denial.

Third, symbolic exclusion reinforces infrastructural injustice through dominant narratives that naturalise neglect. As Bourdieu (1991) suggests, symbolic violence is exercised when systems of domination are accepted as legitimate. In the Eastern Cape, rural underdevelopment is often attributed to geographic remoteness or natural obstacles, rather than systemic disinvestment. This discourse obscures the fact that many rural roads, particularly in former Bantustan areas, were deliberately excluded from investment during apartheid and continue to receive inadequate attention in the democratic era. For example, the road to Mantlaneni Clinic in Lusikisiki remains impassable during the rainy season, as community member Simthembile Myekwa testified in the SAHRC inquiry. Yet, this condition is often viewed as unfortunate rather than unconstitutional, despite clear violations of Sections 27 (healthcare) and 29 (education) of the Constitution. Symbolic exclusion thus works hand-in-hand with material neglect and bureaucratic inertia to constitute a regime of infrastructural inequality.

Nonetheless, this regime is not uncontested. Communities across the Eastern Cape have developed insurgent infrastructures that resist state abandonment. In Ncora, for example, farmers repurposed apartheid-era irrigation pipes to create makeshift drainage systems that prevent road erosion – an act of tactical material agency. Legal activism also plays a role: in the matter of SAHRC 1947/2023, strategic litigation forced emergency repairs on a key access road. These interventions exemplify what Nixon (2011) calls slow violence, a gradual, often invisible form of harm that only becomes visible through persistent struggle. They also resonate with AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2004) concept of people as infrastructure, where social cooperation compensates for formal infrastructural failures.

Therefore, the road infrastructure crisis in the Eastern Cape cannot be understood solely through the prism of engineering or budgetary shortfalls. Rather, it constitutes an inequality regime in which roads serve as both material artefacts and instruments of governance. By illuminating the interplay between material control, bureaucratic violence and symbolic exclusion, this framework reveals how infrastructure is weaponised to sustain spatial hierarchies. At the same time, the emergence of grassroots resistance signals potential ruptures in this regime, offering a decolonial blueprint for re-imagining infrastructure as a tool of liberation rather than oppression. This theoretical scaffolding sets the stage for the empirical analysis that follows in subsequent sections of the paper.

The violence produced through infrastructural neglect is fundamentally temporal. As Nixon (2011) argues, slow violence is characterised by delayed destruction, dispersed responsibility and harm that unfolds gradually rather than spectacularly. In the Eastern Cape, the cumulative effects of deferred road maintenance, repeated washouts and long-term budgetary neglect produce a landscape of attrition in which harm becomes normalised. This temporality obscures accountability while deepening inequality, as suffering accrues incrementally and disproportionately in already marginalised rural spaces.

Methodology

This article is based primarily on a secondary qualitative analysis of the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) Inquiry into the Human Rights Implications of Poor Road Conditions in the Eastern Cape Province (2023), supplemented by documentary analysis of government audits, policy documents and budget reports. While the author is engaged in ongoing independent fieldwork in the Northern Cape, no data from that research are reported in this article, and it is therefore excluded from the present analysis.

The analysis draws on a defined corpus of SAHRC inquiry materials, including oral and written testimonies from affected communities in Alfred Nzo, OR Tambo, Amathole and Joe Gqabi districts; submissions from provincial departments, municipalities and civil society organisations and the Commission’s final findings and recommendations. These materials were subjected to thematic analysis, with particular attention to recurring patterns relating to mobility, access to services, fiscal governance and experiences of abandonment.

While the author’s role as a panel member of the SAHRC inquiry raises potential concerns regarding positionality and bias, this was addressed by relying exclusively on formally recorded inquiry materials, publicly available documentation and attributed submissions, rather than personal recollection or privileged access. All quotations and data are drawn from the official inquiry record. Testimony used in this article is part of the SAHRC’s public archive, with identifying details anonymised in line with the Commission’s ethical protocols.

Findings and discussion

The empirical findings of this study confirm that the road infrastructure crisis in rural Eastern Cape is not a consequence of mere underdevelopment, but institutionalised regime of inequality (Noble and Wright, 2013). This regime, which perpetuates apartheid’s spatial hierarchies under democratic rule, is sustained through three intersecting mechanisms: fiscal apartheid, neoliberal spatial engineering and bureaucratic indifference, all of which manifest as a form of infrastructural violence.

First, a regime of fiscal apartheid is evidenced by a systemic failure in financial management. The underspending of R14.7 million on rural grants is not a simple administrative error but a manufactured ‘capacity constraint’ that diverts essential resources away from the needs of rural communities. The direct consequence of this fiscal neglect is a significant ‘mobility tax’ on the rural poor, who have faced a staggering 114% increase in taxi fares since 2019. This confirms our argument that the neglect of rural areas is a result of policy-driven urban bias (Massey, 1995), with the burden of travel and maintenance costs falling disproportionately on the most vulnerable.

Second, neoliberal spatial engineering exacerbates this inequality. The N2 expansion project, which diverts R1.4 billion from rural access roads, serves as a prime example. This capital-intensive project, while framed as an economic development initiative, reinforces a centre-periphery model by prioritising high-speed transit for commercial interests at the expense of local mobility. This policy validates Tilly’s (1998) theory of durable inequality, as it entrenches the economic and social marginalisation of roadside communities, evidenced by a 31% increase in mine recruitment and average commutes of 4.7 hours.

Finally, the findings expose social abandonment through institutional neglect. The fact that 92% of road graders in Alfred Nzo District were idle (SAHRC, 2023) represents a profound form of bureaucratic violence (Lupton, 2003). This neglect has tangible and devastating human consequences, which we frame as a form of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011). The denial of healthcare is a clear example, with ambulances unable to access clinics. Similarly, the widespread closure of schools, as cited by the Department of Basic Education (2023), systematically violates the right to education.

However, the study also reveals how communities are not passive victims. The grassroots initiatives to repair roads, such as those undertaken by farmers and taxi drivers in Cathcart and Stutterheim, are an act of insurgent planning. They are an affirmation of Simone’s (2004) concept of ‘people as infrastructure’, where residents actively recompose state neglect into forms of self-organised governance. This resistance underscores that while the state may have retreated, communities are actively demanding their right to dignity and mobility (National Planning Commission (NPC), 2012).

Road degradation in the Eastern Cape is experienced not only as an economic constraint but as an embodied form of violence that shapes the rhythms and vulnerabilities of everyday life. Travelling on deeply eroded gravel roads exposes commuters to chronic physical strain, heightened accident risk and prolonged uncertainty. Residents describe journeys marked by bodily exhaustion, anxiety during the rainy season and the constant recalibration of time around impassable routes. These conditions exceed conventional development metrics, materialising instead as lived harm that accumulates in bodies through missed clinic appointments, extended walking distances and unsafe transport practices. In this sense, road neglect operates as a quotidian form of infrastructural violence that is both mundane and debilitating.

Fiscal apartheid in maintenance budgets

The Eastern Cape’s road infrastructure budgetary landscape reveals a deeply racialised and historically entrenched pattern of fiscal neglect that mirrors apartheid-era disparities. This section contends that the continued underfunding of rural road infrastructure constitutes a contemporary form of fiscal apartheid, whereby rural, predominantly black communities are systematically deprived of adequate transport investment under the guise of bureaucratic constraints. The 2022–2023 budget cycle underscores this reality: a staggering R14.7 million earmarked for rural infrastructure development was not spent, with the Department of Transport citing capacity constraints as the reason for the underspending (SAHRC, 2023). These so-called constraints, however, are better understood as manufactured obstacles – products of institutional inertia, mismanagement and intentional de-prioritisation.

The consequences of this budgetary failure are not abstract. The Alfred Nzo District, for example, reported that 92% of graders in Alfred Nzo District remained idle during the 2022/23 financial year (SAHRC, 2023: 112) during critical months when heavy rainfall renders rural roads impassable. Graders are essential for maintaining gravel roads, especially in remote areas where surfacing is non-existent. The idleness of these machines is not a technical glitch; it is a political outcome. It signals a governance choice to neglect rural terrain and thereby restrict rural mobility. The impact is felt most acutely by rural households, who have seen taxi fares more than double since 2019.

This cost burden constitutes a form of regressive taxation, a mobility tax that penalises the poor for the state’s infrastructural failures. It forces families to spend an ever-larger share of their income on accessing schools, clinics and markets. This reality starkly contradicts the constitutional promise of equality and dignity. More broadly, it perpetuates a pattern first entrenched during apartheid, where the state treated black rural communities as labour reserves rather than citizens. As Lipton (1977) documented, the apartheid regime allocated only 17% of transport budgets to the homelands, even though these areas were home to over 40% of the population. This same budgetary logic appears in contemporary form through the chronic neglect of rural roads in the Eastern Cape.

Furthermore, fiscal apartheid in maintenance budgets is sustained by weak intergovernmental coordination and a lack of transparency in expenditure reporting. Fobosi and Malima (2025) flagged consistent failures in project delivery, noting that contractors often abandon rural road upgrades midway or deliver substandard work without consequence. Despite the introduction of conditional grants such as the PRMG, there is limited enforcement of performance benchmarks, and financial penalties for underperformance are rarely imposed. The absence of a reliable monitoring mechanism allows municipal and provincial departments to reallocate funds to politically expedient urban projects while rural roads languish in disrepair.

This systemic misallocation is not merely a policy failure but a violation of constitutional obligations. Sections 27 and 29 of the Constitution guarantee access to healthcare and education, respectively, both of which are directly undermined when roads are impassable. Ambulances in regions like Lusikisiki take hours to reach patients, and school transport is routinely cancelled due to poor road conditions. These outcomes are foreseeable, preventable and repeated, signalling structural violence rather than isolated service delivery lapses.

Addressing this fiscal apartheid requires both financial redress and institutional reform. First, ring-fenced funding for rural road maintenance must be made legally binding, with clear, enforceable timelines. Second, public oversight must be strengthened through community monitoring forums that track grader utilisation, contractor performance and budget rollovers. Finally, alternative financing models, such as a dedicated rural infrastructure fuel levy, should be explored to ensure consistent investment in under-served areas. Without these interventions, the Eastern Cape will remain trapped in a cycle of infrastructural marginality, and the constitutional promise of equal access and mobility will remain an unfulfilled fiction for millions of rural residents.

Labour control through road diets

The N2 Wild Coast Road expansion project, envisioned as a developmental artery linking Mthatha and Port Edward, has become a stark manifestation of neoliberal spatial engineering. While publicly promoted as a catalyst for regional economic growth and connectivity, its implementation has diverted substantial resources away from the very communities that require urgent infrastructural investment. According to the South African National Roads Agency (SANRAL), a staggering R1.4 billion has been redirected from rural access roads to support the N2 expansion. This reallocation of funds not only undermines rural infrastructure development but perpetuates the structural inequalities rooted in South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past.

This infrastructural prioritisation reflects a shift towards urban-centric mega-projects that serve capital accumulation and national logistics, often at the expense of localised development. The SAHRC (2023) warns that this project has left numerous rural villages along the intended route with degraded or entirely inaccessible roadways. The real costs are borne by communities such as Flagstaff, Bizana and Lusikisiki, areas where gravel roads remain unrepaired, school access is impaired and emergency services face untenable delays. Far from being integrated into a national economy, these regions are rendered infrastructural hinterlands, locked out of the developmental benefits promised by the state.

This pattern of neglect is not incidental; it reinforces the availability of cheap and mobile labour pools for extractive industries. The SAHRC, 2023 report notes a 31% increase in mine recruitment from roadside villages since the start of the N2 expansion. As access to services declines, the only viable economic activity left for many residents is to seek employment in distant mines. The average commute of 4.7 hours, reported by residents, amounts to an exploitative endurance test that depletes both time and income. Such conditions reproduce a reserve army of labour, in Marxian terms, sustaining capital-intensive industries through the disposability and overwork of black rural bodies.

This reality echoes Tilly’s (1998) durable inequality framework, which demonstrates how institutions embed categorical hierarchies, here spatial ones, into the very design of society. Infrastructure is not merely a set of roads, bridges and tarmac; it is an apparatus of power that dictates who is visible to the state and who is ignored. The N2 expansion may symbolise progress on paper, but for roadside communities, it means abandonment, sacrifice and exploitation. It affirms that the state’s infrastructure agenda is less about equitable development and more about maintaining access to extractive zones through peripheral populations.

Furthermore, this neoliberal spatial strategy undermines participatory governance. While public consultations were ostensibly held, civil society organisations such as the Public Service Accountability Monitor (PSAM) and the Trust for Community Outreach and Education (TCOE) note that local voices were marginalised in decision-making. Communities that raised concerns about the deteriorating conditions of feeder roads were often dismissed or redirected to ill-equipped municipalities. This procedural exclusion exemplifies anti-politics machine of development – where technocratic decisions depoliticise real conflicts of power and distribution.

The human toll of this strategy is severe. Rural residents, particularly women and youth, are stripped of access to educational, health and commercial opportunities. The N2 expansion has become a barrier rather than a bridge, physically dividing communities while symbolically reaffirming their marginality. These effects call for a radical re-imagining of infrastructure not as a product of elite planning, but as a participatory and equitable process rooted in local needs.

Addressing the inequalities exacerbated by the N2 expansion demands more than policy tweaks. It requires redistributive infrastructure planning; prioritising local access roads, reinstating transparent participatory mechanisms and channelling funds towards basic connectivity in marginalised regions. Without such a shift, large-scale projects will continue to serve capital while deepening the structural exclusion of rural Eastern Cape. Infrastructure, in this context, must be reclaimed as a site of justice, not just development.

Cracks in the regime?

Despite the pervasiveness of infrastructural inequality across the Eastern Cape, community-led initiatives have begun to expose and fracture the dominant regime. These cracks not only reveal the failures of the state but also offer a compelling vision of how marginalised communities are reclaiming agency through tactical resistance. The farmers, shopkeepers and taxi drivers from Cathcart and Stutterheim regions of the Eastern began repairing roads themselves in 2012 stands out as a striking example of such resistance, embodying the convergence of material subversion, legal action and discursive re-framing. In doing so, they represent what Simone (2004) characterises as people as infrastructure, the capacity of ordinary individuals to form adaptive, resourceful networks that substitute and often outperform the state in delivering public goods.

The material interventions of the farmers, shopkeepers and taxi drivers from Cathcart and Stutterheim are both pragmatic and subversive. Faced with years of neglected road maintenance and devastating seasonal washouts, the collective undertook the construction of 14 kilometres of self-built drainage systems using salvaged irrigation pipes and communal labour. This do-it-yourself engineering effort, executed without external technical or financial assistance, resulted in a 63% reduction in road washouts in the 2023 rainy season, as reported in local agricultural cooperatives’ monitoring reports. This figure not only demonstrates the tangible benefits of grassroots engineering but also underscores the collective’s capacity to mitigate the effects of infrastructural abandonment. It is an act of material subversion that reclaims control over mobility and access, effectively rebuffing the state’s infrastructural neglect.

Beyond the physical, the collective has engaged the legal system to force state accountability. In 2023, they filed SAHRC Case 1947/2023, detailing the chronic inaccessibility of rural roads and the resulting violations of constitutional rights. This legal mobilisation yielded results: the Alfred Nzo District Municipality was compelled to issue an emergency intervention plan for road repairs in the Ncora region, including the allocation of maintenance resources previously withheld due to capacity constraints. The case set a critical precedent in rural infrastructural jurisprudence, demonstrating that constitutional litigation can be a viable tool for holding municipalities to account. This legal leverage challenges the bureaucratic inertia that often shelters state actors from consequences.

Perhaps most significantly, the collective catalysed a discursive shift in local governance structures. Prior to their activism, the roads in and around Ncora were consistently labelled as low priority in successive IDPs, effectively sidelining them from funding cycles. Through persistent advocacy, including community petitions, media engagement and participation in IDP consultations, the collective successfully altered the classification of these roads in the 2024 IDP. The roads were reclassified as critical agricultural corridors, aligning their formal recognition with the region’s socio-economic reality. This reclassification carries real budgetary implications, opening the door to future inclusion in regional development frameworks.

This triad of resistance, material subversion, legal leverage and discursive shift illustrates a sophisticated form of grassroots insurgency. It signals not just dissatisfaction with governance but a radical re-imagining of state-citizen relations. The farmers, shopkeepers and taxi drivers in Cathcart and Stutterheim have not merely resisted state neglect; they have built an alternative infrastructure of accountability, participation and resilience. Their work validates Simone’s (2004) theorization of infrastructural citizenship, where marginalised populations assert their right to space and services not through formal entitlements but through active, generative practices.

These efforts also illustrate that resistance is not always opposed; it can be reconstructive. By organising drainage construction, engaging the law and altering the language of policy documents, the collective has enacted a politics of relationality, where resistance is embedded in the transformation of everyday practices and relationships. These forms of micro-resistance, while limited in geographic scope, have the potential for replication across similarly marginalised contexts in South Africa and beyond.

Importantly, such community-led responses highlight the limitations of conventional top-down development strategies that often overlook local knowledge and agency. The Cathcart and Stutterheim example challenges development planners, policymakers and legal scholars to broaden their understanding of infrastructure, not as a fixed product of state engineering but as a contested, lived and co-produced terrain. It urges a paradigm shift from technocratic delivery to participatory construction, from hierarchical decision-making to collaborative governance.

Therefore, the actions of the farmers, shopkeepers and taxi drivers in Cathcart and Stutterheim fracture the myth of rural passivity and offer a blueprint for responsive, community-driven infrastructural justice. Their story exemplifies how people, in the absence of adequate state support, become the infrastructure that sustains their communities. In doing so, they not only confront the structural violence of infrastructural inequality but also begin to reimagine the very foundations of public life in post-apartheid South Africa.

The legal vacuum: infrastructure, rights and the failure of enforcement

This section interrogates the juridical silences and institutional failures that underpin the Eastern Cape’s road infrastructure crisis. While prior sections have highlighted the spatial and political economy dimensions of infrastructural inequality, this section focuses on the legal frameworks, both constitutional and administrative, that have failed to enforce the rights of rural communities. Despite South Africa’s progressive Constitution, the legal system has remained largely inert in addressing infrastructural decay as a matter of rights-based justice. Instead, the state’s consistent failure to deliver on rural roads is shielded by vague obligations, judicial passivity and a lack of legal mechanisms that would enable enforcement. What emerges is a landscape where constitutional promises remain rhetorical, and the law’s capacity to transform material conditions is structurally constrained.

At the centre of this legal vacuum lies a contradiction between constitutional rights and their operationalisation. Section 27 guarantees the right to healthcare, Section 29 enshrines the right to basic education and Section 21 ensures the right to freedom of movement. Each of these rights is critically dependent on functioning road infrastructure. Without reliable transport routes, ambulances cannot reach patients, learners cannot attend school consistently and people cannot move safely and affordably between economic and social nodes. Yet, when rural residents confront the state about impassable roads, the response is typically administrative deflection, citing budget constraints, weather conditions or logistical difficulties. These rationalisations, while bureaucratically plausible, effectively strip these rights of enforceability.

The issue is compounded by the judiciary’s reluctance to treat infrastructure as a domain of justiciable rights. Unlike housing or water, which have seen constitutional jurisprudence emerge through landmark cases such as Grootboom or Mazibuko, rural road infrastructure remains a legally uncharted territory. There is a conspicuous absence of case law establishing minimum core obligations for infrastructure as a social good. Courts tend to defer to the executive’s discretion, viewing infrastructural decisions as policy matters rather than questions of rights enforcement. This deference is understandable given the separation of powers, but it leaves affected communities with little recourse when roads become death traps, economic barriers or instruments of social exclusion.

This is not due to a lack of attempts. Instances such as farmers, shopkeepers and taxi drivers in Cathcart and Stutterheim repairing roads in 2012, exemplify how rural communities have sought to translate grievances into legal pressure. While such cases can yield short-term victories, such as temporary road repairs or commitments to future maintenance, they rarely lead to lasting structural change. The legal outcomes remain limited because South African law lacks the binding obligations necessary to sustain durable improvements in infrastructure. There are no national benchmarks, for instance, that define the acceptable condition or accessibility of rural roads. Without such standards, legal arguments remain vulnerable to rebuttals grounded in technical feasibility or fiscal capacity.

The absence of binding legal duties is mirrored in the state’s oversight architecture. Institutions such as the Auditor-General (AGSA), the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) and the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA) have repeatedly flagged road degradation, underspending and systemic neglect. Yet these findings, while revealing, are not enforceable. The AGSA may report on fiscal mismanagement, but it cannot compel departments to act. Similarly, the SAHRC’s recommendations, even when they highlight constitutional infringements, are advisory rather than prescriptive. The result is what may be termed oversight fatigue, a cycle of exposé without consequence, wherein state actors become immune to criticism through sheer repetition.

This legal vacuum is reinforced by the design of intergovernmental structures. The concurrent competencies between national, provincial and local governments create grey zones of responsibility. When a road deteriorates in a rural ward, it is often unclear whether the municipality, province or national agency holds jurisdiction. This fragmentation is not merely administrative; it functions as a barrier to accountability. Citizens seeking redress are bounced between departments; none of which claim full responsibility, but all cite limited budgets or capacity. The net effect is legal dilution: rights are dispersed across multiple levels of government, and thus, difficult to enforce from any single vantage point.

One might argue that the legal system simply reflects material realities: that the state cannot be legally compelled to build or maintain roads it cannot afford. But this argument presumes that infrastructure is a luxury, not a necessity. The reality, as shown throughout this paper, is that roads are enablers of life, rights and development. Treating them as discretionary infrastructure instead of foundational social goods distorts the state’s constitutional obligations. This is particularly egregious in rural areas, where road access determines whether a child can attend school, whether a woman in labour reaches a clinic and whether a farmer can transport goods to market.

The legal framework must therefore be reimagined to reflect this. A rights-based infrastructure regime would begin with the establishment of minimum core obligations for rural roads, akin to the legal standards developed for housing or water. These obligations should be codified in legislation, with clear performance indicators, timelines and budget allocations. Moreover, citizens should be able to litigate non-compliance. This would shift infrastructure from a space of political discretion to one of constitutional duty. The judicial system, in turn, must evolve to recognise that infrastructural neglect, particularly when it impairs access to essential services such as health, education and mobility, is not merely a technical lapse but a legal violation.

Equally, administrative law reform is required to bridge the enforcement gap. The mandates of oversight bodies, such as the SAHRC and AGSA, should be expanded to include binding compliance mechanisms, or at least formal referrals to the judiciary. Coordination between spheres of government must be clarified and codified so that jurisdictional ambiguity cannot be used to evade responsibility. Perhaps most importantly, civil society organisations must be capacitated to bring collective litigation on behalf of affected communities, shifting the legal burden from isolated complainants to broader, systemic action.

Therefore, the law has largely failed to serve as a bulwark against infrastructural injustice. Not because the Constitution is silent, but because the legal system has lacked the imagination, tools and political will to enforce the rights it enshrines. In the Eastern Cape, the road remains a site of exclusion not just because of asphalt and gravel, but because of the silence of the law. Reclaiming it will require not just budgets and graders, but legal reform, constitutional courage and the reconfiguration of accountability structures that can compel the state to deliver not only services, but justice.

Conclusion

The state of rural road infrastructure in the Eastern Cape functions as both a material and symbolic archive, recording decades of spatial violence inherited from apartheid and exposing the betrayals of post-apartheid governance. Rather than being neutral artefacts of development or misfortune, roads reveal the mechanics of state power: who is seen, who is served and who is left behind. This analysis has yielded three interlinked conclusions, each of which demands attention not only for its academic significance but also for its implications for constitutional justice, development planning and grassroots mobilisation.

First, roads must be understood not merely as conduits for movement but as regimes in their own right. This study has demonstrated that infrastructure functions as a sophisticated governance technology, deeply embedded in political, economic and social systems. Tilly’s (1998) theory of durable inequality explains how spatial arrangements are designed and maintained to reproduce hierarchies. In the Eastern Cape, roads have been constructed or not constructed in ways that entrench the marginalisation of rural communities. Through mechanisms such as fiscal apartheid in maintenance budgets, urban-biased planning regimes and symbolic exclusion, the state has effectively codified inequality into the very ground. Infrastructure here is not simply absent; it is actively withdrawn, diverted or rendered dysfunctional to preserve core-periphery dynamics.

This analysis reframes neglect as structurally reproduced through institutional arrangements, fiscal priorities and accountability failures. The case of R1.4 billion redirected from rural access roads to the N2 expansion highlights how elite infrastructural projects prioritise economic corridors while sacrificing rural livelihoods. Likewise, the chronic underspending of rural road maintenance grants, framed as capacity constraints, is better understood as a form of bureaucratic violence. These are not random administrative failures but systemic practices that reflect broader neoliberal and post-apartheid governance logics. The infrastructure state, far from being universally benevolent, selectively distributes connectivity based on perceived economic utility, political expedience and historical precedence.

Second, and in contrast to the state’s failures, this paper has highlighted how acts of community resistance offer compelling blueprints for decolonial alternatives. The actions of Cathcart and Stutterheim farmers, shopkeepers and taxi drivers to repair roads exemplify how marginalised communities refuse to remain passive recipients of state neglect. Their innovations in do-it-yourself engineering, constitutional litigation and participatory planning represent a multidimensional insurgency that reclaims infrastructure from the state and repositions it within the community. Their use of salvaged materials for drainage, successful legal pressure through the SAHRC and reclassification of roads in IDPs from low priority to critical agricultural corridors demonstrates that community-led resistance is not only reactive but strategic, visionary and impactful.

This grassroots agency aligns with Simone’s (2004) concept of people as infrastructure, where human networks and cooperation substitute for the state’s withdrawal. It also echoes Escobar’s (2008) call for relational and place-based politics, rooted in lived experience and local knowledge. These initiatives are not isolated; they are part of a growing pattern of micro-resistances that challenge centralised, technocratic development paradigms. As such, they raise crucial questions about scalability. Can these experiments in insurgent infrastructure inform broader policy transformations? Or will they remain confined to pockets of resistance, impressive but peripheral?

Third, the state’s constitutional commitment to redress, particularly under Section 25(5) of the Constitution, remains largely a constitutional fiction. This clause, which promises equitable access to land and resources, is routinely undermined by the very practices described in this report. The Eastern Cape’s road crisis is not merely a transportation issue; it is a justice issue. The inability of rural communities to access schools, hospitals and markets due to neglected roads amounts to a structural denial of dignity, equality and freedom of movement. That these conditions persist thirty years into democracy indicts not just municipal incompetence but the failure of national policy to address the spatial legacies of apartheid in any meaningful, systemic way.

This conclusion, therefore, serves as both a critique and a call to action. If infrastructure is to serve as a bridge to justice rather than a tool of exclusion, South Africa’s planning paradigms must be fundamentally reoriented. This requires (1) enforcing equity-based criteria in national and provincial infrastructure budgets, (2) legally protecting community roads through rights-based frameworks, (3) institutionalising participatory planning processes at all levels and (4) recognising community-driven interventions not as anomalies, but as valid and necessary components of development.

Ultimately, this paper argues that the road, in both its literal and metaphorical dimensions, is a contested space that can perpetuate inequality or enable justice. The choice lies in how society, the state and communities mobilise around it. The Eastern Cape’s crumbling rural roads not only tell the story of neglect, but they also narrate a struggle for recognition, access and transformation. Whether these roads will continue to function as technologies of control or be reimagined as pathways to freedom depends not just on budgets and blueprints, but on the political will to listen, respond and reconfigure the terrain of infrastructural citizenship.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author extends sincere gratitude to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) for their invaluable work and for granting access to the data and testimonies from the Inquiry into the Human Rights Implications of Poor Road Conditions in the Eastern Cape Province. Special thanks are due to the communities of Mantlaneni, Gcibhala, Zigudu, Gwatyu and countless others who shared their experiences and struggles, often under difficult circumstances. Their courage and resilience are the foundation of this research. Appreciation is also extended to civil society organisations, including the Public Service Accountability Monitor (PSAM), the Trust for Community Outreach and Education (TCOE) and the Amathole Tourism Association, for their detailed submissions and ongoing advocacy. The insights from government officials and parastatal entities who participated in the inquiry are also acknowledged.

Author note

This paper benefitted from the constructive feedback of colleagues at the University of Fort Hare. Any errors or omissions remain the sole responsibility of the author.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The author declares no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced the writing of this article. As a panel member of the SAHRC Inquiry referenced in this study, the author was involved in the data-collection process. Every effort has been made to ensure the analysis presented is objective and grounded in the empirical evidence gathered.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Ethical approval statement

Ethical approval for this study was granted by the University of Fort Hare Inter-Faculty Human Research Ethics Committee (IFHREC) on 05 December 2024, with the ethics clearance reference number FOB003-24 (Project). The research was performed in accordance with the ethical guidelines set out in the IFHREC’s policies and standard operating procedures, and it was confirmed that the study meets national and international guidelines for research on humans.

ORCID iD

Siyabulela Christopher Fobosi

Data availability statement

The data supporting the findings of this study are publicly available on the SAHRC website.

Author biography

Siyabulela Christopher Fobosi is a seasoned South African public sociologist and a Senior Researcher at the University of Fort Hare. His research extensively explores the political economy of the minibus taxi industry, labour precarity, and the intersection of urban mobility with human rights in the Global South. A prolific author and commentator, he holds a PhD in Industrial Sociology and actively contributes to policy debates regarding social justice, infrastructure development, and the informal economy.

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