Cut in Two: How the Langkloof’s Farmers Are Fighting to Get SANRAL Moving on the R62

When the rain finally stopped falling in the Langkloof in early May, it left behind a valley split in half. Between Joubertina and Kareedouw, a stretch of the R62 known locally as “container draai” simply vanished; washed away to a depth of six to eight metres, as mountain streams, swollen overnight into rivers, ate the ground out from under the road beside a bridge. What had been a quick run to the port became, almost overnight, the defining crisis of the Langkloof’s year. By Elise-Marie Steenkamp

A lifeline severed mid-harvest

The timing could hardly have been worse. The R62 is, in the words of Johan Kotze, chairman of the Langkloof Vrugtevereniging (LVV), the lifeline of the valley — and it failed at the height of the export season, with roughly 40% of the year’s fruit volume already packed and en route.

Every container that could no longer take the direct route to the port at Coega now had to detour via George in the Western Cape, an extra 600 km and, by some estimates, more than ten hours on the road.

In May, Kotze’s submission to SANRAL quantified the cost of that detour: about R15,000 per refrigerated container, roughly R250,000 a day across the industry, and a projected R28-million loss over the course of the season — losses, he wrote bluntly, that producers cannot absorb.

And it isn’t only fruit. Suppliers of packaging materials now had to drive an extra 600 km to reach the valley. Fresh produce, dairy and other food supplies from Gqeberha and Humansdorp have been disrupted. Perhaps most seriously, the Langkloof falls administratively within the Eastern Cape but relies on Western Cape medical services in George — services that were effectively cut off, forcing patients to be rerouted to Humansdorp or Gqeberha. As Kotze put it in his appeal to SANRAL, a closed road means people’s lives are being gambled with.

Riaan Strydom of Bokmakierie Holdings, a poultry and fruit farm in the Krakeelriver area, lost about 15,000-day-old chicks when floodwater rushed into one of his poultry houses, reaching a depth of half a metre. With the road washed away, he ran one truck from Gqeberha to the damaged section and kept a second waiting on the far side, while ten workers carried crates of chicks across the gap by hand — a 40-minute relay just to get day-old chicks into the valley. In the Bo-Langkloof area alone, livestock producers reported losses of around 700 lambs and 3,000 Angora goats, on top of damage to orchards, bridges and irrigation infrastructure across the wider valley.

 

 

 

Applying formal pressure, in writing

Where farmers couldn’t act unilaterally, they pushed procedurally — and hard. Kotze’s letter on behalf of the Langkloof Agricultural Society and Langkloof Fruit Association didn’t just describe the damage; it set SANRAL a deadline, requesting written feedback and target dates by 17h00 on 13 May 2026, covering the appointment of a quantity surveyor, the appointment of consulting engineers, the issuing of tenders, and the selection of a contractor with firm completion dates for both a truck-capable bypass and the permanent repair. The association asked, point-blank, for the project to be completed within two to three weeks.

A second letter from Kotze, a week or so later, shows the association continuing to hold SANRAL’s timeline up against itself, line by line: surveyor’s data handed to the engineer on 18 May, tender documents sent to contractors by 21 May — and then a string of dates marked “outstanding”: the date tenders were due back, the date a tender would be awarded, the date the contractor would be on site, and the date the bypass would open.

Kotze pressed SANRAL to commit specifically to those missing dates, “to hold SANRAL responsible on the dates that they provide us with,” and asked whether the eventual bypass would be single- or double-lane.

SANRAL’s correspondence reads as that of an agency caught between urgency and its own procurement rules. SANRAL was “acutely aware” of the pressure farmers were under but stressed that the agency had to follow procedure strictly to avoid an adverse finding by the Auditor-General — even as the target for getting a contractor on site slipped towards the end of May.

Farmers patch their own roads while waiting on SANRAL

While the R62 itself remained SANRAL’s responsibility, smaller district and farm roads were a different matter. With the valley left without electricity and several main gravel roads washed away, the farming community began repairing roads themselves to make them temporarily passable, often renting heavy machinery at their own expense to clear and reinstate damaged sections. By mid-May, the emergency repair work was said to be about 80% complete, and farmers were already compiling a report for the relevant state department in the hope of eventually being reimbursed for repairs carried out on what are technically state roads.

On the R62 itself, the appetite for the same approach ran straight into a wall. According to Kotze, farmers raised the possibility of building the bypass themselves, and SANRAL was unambiguous in its response: “it would take no responsibility for a farmer-built bypass. While it could not legally stop work on private property, the risk of doing so was, in the agency’s assessment, substantial”.

The Langkloof community felt it had no choice. They stepped in to build a private bypass, temporarily replacing the damaged R62 route between Kareedouw and Joubertina. The private road was built out of necessity after repairs were not made for more than seven weeks following the floods in early May. The road was built by Danie de Vos, and Cornelis Muller made his land available for the bypass.

According to Johan Kotze, this saved significant time and costs because containers no longer had to travel via George.

The South African National Roads Agency (SANRAL) has since appointed a contractor to carry out the repairs.

The construction of the road on private land was driven by the local farmers’ association to send export fruit from the Langkloof to the Port Elizabeth and Ngqura ports in Gqeberha. The “new” road has cost the community around R700 000 to date, with an estimated final cost of R1.2 million. Since the floods, they have not yet received any financial assistance from any government institution.

A road that was already a sore point

Part of the reason farmers reacted so quickly and formally was that the R62 had long been a known weak point even before the floods. The Eastern Cape government had already contracted a rebuild of the road, due for completion by the end of this year, but the original contractor, meant to start at Louterwater in July last year, only began work in late August and has since gone bankrupt, having done virtually no meaningful work — prompting a search for a replacement contractor even as the flood crisis unfolded.

Kotze’s frustration is clear: “They haven’t broken up a single section of tar,” he said, noting that the previous contractor’s only visible activity was roadside work and stop-and-go points that disrupted harvesting.

The bigger picture

What’s striking in all of this is less the damage than the pattern of response: a community that didn’t wait passively for a state agency to act, but moved on every front available to it — clearing and rebuilding what it could legally do itself, while applying sustained written pressure with explicit deadlines on the one piece of road it couldn’t touch.

“This is yet another symptom of the public sector failing not only the fruit industry, but a whole rural community, which will have a knock-on effect for a number of years,” said Hortgro Executive Director, Anton Rabe.

For now, the Langkloof’s producers are doing what Kotze said they’d do from the start: carrying on with what they can, one crate, one truck, one letter to SANRAL at a time.

Pictures supplied: Aerial photographs by Christi Strydom and roadworks pictures by Danie de Vos.

• External media information sources used: African Farming, Landbou.com, AgriOrbit, FreshPlaza and the Kouga Express.