Pretoria mayor says city only has 5 potholes — here is how many we counted in an hour

While Tshwane mayor Nasiphi Moya recently claimed that the city only had five potholes, MyBroadband counted 51 on less than 0.4% of the capital city’s roads.

In her 100-day turnaround plan for the city published in February 2025, Moya said her administration had fixed 687 of the 692 potholes it inherited from the previous municipal government.

Moya was voted in as mayor on October 2024, after her party ActionSA switched allegiances and helped the ANC oust DA mayor Cilliers Brink.

On social media, Tshwane residents and opposition parties reacted with disbelief and anger over Moya’s statements.

Many accused the mayor of lying or being uninformed about the state of the city’s roads.

“This mayor lives in La La Land,” one resident said. “I stay in Tshwane and Breedt Street in Montana and several other streets are full of potholes,” they stated.

“She should drive in Centurion more often. We don’t need speed cameras anymore because we do 10km to get around them,” another said.

Some questioned why Moya believed that even having as little as five potholes was deemed acceptable.

A municipal worker who spoke to The Citizen on condition of anonymity alleged that the city had ignored many potholes for months.

“Nothing is being done. You feel like a drunkard driving down Haarhoff Street from 18th Avenue to 21st Avenue, where there are easily about 30 potholes,” the worker said.

MyBroadband also found the mayor’s claim curious as several of our staff members regularly drive on Tshwane roads and had seen far more than five potholes.

We decided to put speculation to rest by driving around several suburbs and major arterial roads in the middle to upper-class area of Pretoria East to see how many potholes we could count.

Setting off at 16:17 on 11 May 2025, we spotted our first pothole after about three minutes of driving.

Located near Moreleta Corner shopping centre, it was a monster — measuring more than a meter across between its two furthest points.

Nonetheless, that still only counts as one.

It took another 10 minutes and about 5km of travelling for our pothole tally to climb to six — already exceeding the mayor’s figure.

After travelling roughly 30km in an hour, we had counted 51 potholes in parts of Moreleta Park, Elardus Park, Wingate Park, and Garsfontein.

On the positive side, we did find numerous potholes that were patched in recent weeks.

However, many of these already showed clear signs of deterioration.

The municipal worker who spoke to The Citizen said that although the city claimed to have fixed many potholes, the repairs were often so bad that the potholes reformed after it rained.

Below are images of some recently patched potholes on Garsfontein and Devillabos Mareuil Drive that had started reforming less than a month after being patched.

Thousands rather than hundreds of potholes

It is possible that there are thousands of potholes currently on Tshwane’s roads.

Measured in geographical size, Tshwane’s 6,298km footprint makes it not only the largest metro in South Africa but the third-biggest in the world.

According to a report compiled by Nyeleti Consulting for the city, Tshwane had 8,678km of roads in 2007.

Roughly 1,126km of these were provincial roads or freeways, meaning they fell outside the responsibility of the municipality.

The 30km we covered made up just 0.4% of the remaining 7,556km under the metro’s jurisdiction.

However, considering the road network has grown since 2008, the actual proportion covered is likely much lower.

If the state of roads in other parts of the city were similar to those we covered, there could be over 12,000 potholes.

However, it would take a detailed ground survey to confirm this.

It should be emphasised that Moya did not provide a definition for what the municipality considers to be a pothole.

It is possible that the metro has certain dimensions and depths for a damaged part of the road to be considered a pothole.

That being said, MyBroadband only counted those potholes we believed could potentially damage a tyre or rim when driven through at the legal speed on a particular section of road.

Below are photos of some of the potholes we counted while driving through a handful of suburbs in Pretoria East on 11 May 2025.