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.