The Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC) are waiting in anticipation for the South African National Roads Agency (SANRAL) to respond to their petition to Parliament to realign the N2. 

The ACC petition was briefly discussed at a Portfolio Committee of Transport meeting on Thursday to consider the N2 highway Amadiba alignment and a midterm review of the N2 project. 

The community wants Parliament to intervene and support their proposal that the final stretch of the proposed N2 running through Amadiba, from north of Mtentu mega bridge to the KZN border, be moved away from the Amadiba Wild Coast to an Inland alignment. 

The portfolio committee invited representatives of the Amadiba community to present the petition they had filed with Parliament in September 2025. Nonhle Mbuthuma, spokesperson for ACC, said that 79 representatives from 14 Amadiba villages signed the petition. 

Mbuthuma said they anticipate that the Department of Transport will visit the area before the end of October 2025. She said that on Friday, 17 October, an imbizo with 130 attending from 9 villages at Xolobeni Komkhulu in Amadiba, approved the report which covered the previous day’s meeting with the Portfolio Committee of Transport.

“On Thursday, the petitioners argued that the N2 highway must be placed in the middle of Amadiba to better serve local and regional development. The proposed Development Corridor 1, referred to in the 2023 Eastern Seaboard Regional Spatial Development Framework (RSDF), is then shifted 12 to 15km from the Wild Coast in Amadiba to the centre of Amadiba, where usual commercial development belongs,” she said. 

Mbuthuma said that it was emphasised to the Portfolio Committee that the current N2 route will destroy successful local agriculture by passing through 101 arable fields and 83 homesteads will need to be relocated, as well as graves. 

She said that the social and economic impact of the highway being moved to the centre of Amadiba will be less harmful.

“The N2 route was decided 20 years ago. Today, the highway route conflicts with the 2020 Eastern Cape Biodiversity Conservation Plan, designed to protect the heart of the Pondoland Centre of Floral Endemism. This protected and sensitive environment will be further disturbed by inevitable ‘ribbon development’ and unregulated sand mining,” she said. 

The ACC argues that the alternative inland route will be less costly to build than SANRAL’s preferred route.

While the date for SANRAL to respond to the petition in Parliament has not been given, the entity’s website explains that the N2 Wild Coast road (N2WCR) construction project will stretch over a distance of 410km from East London to the Eastern Cape’s boundary with KwaZulu-Natal. 

According to SANRAL, the new N2 will open up this coastal strip while also providing a safer, flatter and faster link between Durban and the industrial centres of East London and Port Elizabeth. It will benefit businesses operating along the entire east coast as well as stimulate the development of the Wild Coast.

SANRAL states that the N2 Wild Coast Region Biodiversity Offset Programme will result in the Silaka and Mkhambathi nature reserves being expanded, and lead to the creation of several new protected areas in the Pondoland Centre of Floral Endemism, totaling approximately 20,000H (200km2).

zainul.dawood@inl.co.za

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