If you look closely, you can see stenciled markings on the yellow poles. These felt like official markings to me so I tried to figure out how to use the markings to narrow down the list of candidate cities.
According to Wikipedia, the _Burger_ newspaper is distributed only in three regions: Western, Eastern, and Northern Cape. There are not too many large-ish towns in these district.
So I made a list of all towns with >50k inhabitants. Looking at those cities on Street View one by one, I found there are only two towns where the yellow poles have the exact same typeface of stencil numbers on them: East London and Uitenhage.
So I took a closer look at either town. (After a few misses, you quickly get a feeling where to find the parts of towns where the roads actually have traffic lights). With a bit of luck, I actually managed to locate the first picture just by randomly clicking on corners. Its coordinates are 33.7648S/25.4012E.
And as a South African, I would immediately know it was SA just by the look of the traffic lights and street signs.
I agree that there is no way to know which city it is in the first photo.
In the article there is the line: "Some quick Googling revealed several universities in Pretoria, and I decided to wing it and take a closer look at the Pretoria skyline."
That's glossing over a very important part of figuring it out. Because once you know which city it makes it much easier.