GREY MUTTER lance fredericks That will be R10 extra Mi’Lady...

HAVE you heard the joke about the pensioner who walked into a clothing store to pay her account of R7.77, just to find that the franchise had added a mysterious extra R10 to her account, taking the amount to R17.77?

The punchline is that this pensioner just happens to be my mother, who – not wanting to shout and rant with the staff who she knew and respected, having been a regular customer at this particular clothing store for a number of years, even before they opened a branch at the Mall – was desperate to know where the extra R10 came from.

Head office was adamant … “She must pay; the computer says so!”

After 40 minutes of being on her feet at the counter, waiting for the staff to intercede with head office, she eventually decided: “You know what, I am tired and not in the mood for this. Here’s your R17.77 … please close my account!”

I wonder how other, less respectful customers are dealing with that extra R10 charge on their accounts … if they have noticed it.

It’s funny how things can sneak up on you.

Less than a year ago I signed a contract with an internet service provider. The agreement was that I would pay a certain amount for a two-year period and after that everyone would reassess things.

Since then, the price of the signed contract has been hiked twice. When I queried it they simply said: “That’s covered in the Terms and Conditions”.

That certainly crept up on me. Was it back in 2008/9? I can’t remember, because I didn’t own a car then, but it was around that time that everyone was complaining about an unfair “once-off ” fee of R30 that was being added to the “eNaTIS vehicle licence fees”.

Apparently something called Aarto (Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences) was being set up and everyone, everywhere who owned a car had to pay this once-off charge to finance the set-up of the computer system that would keep track of fines and people who failed to pay them.

A few years later people were again complaining because the onceoff fee was being charged every year. Maybe everyone had misunderstood the original announcement. Perhaps the majority of South Africans didn’t get the memo that the Aarto fee was in fact once-off forever.

However, be that as it may, still later there was grumbling because the fee had, over time, steadily increased from R30 to R36, and then later to R42.

But then in October last year sanity flew out of the window! The Aarto fee, it was announced, would in February this year, rocket up to R72. The current inflation rate is 4.8 percent, but that increase is almost 15 times more.

The previous increases were only around 17 percent.

Back in October 2017 the Justice Project South Africa (JPSA) did some research and found that the RTMC (the Road Traffic Management Corporation) managed to rake in R453 143 790 in transaction fees in the 2016/17 financial year.

What will that amount of over R400 million increase to with this massive rate hike? It’s also interesting to note that the CEO of RTMC saw a salary increase of 31.6 percent, from R5 950 000 to R7 830 000 during the same period. Senior staff also received increases of around 19.1 percent.

Now, following the trend that seems to be developing here, it seems that with a 75 percent hike in Aarto fees the road users in SA can but brace themselves to one day hear how RMTC’s CEO and senior staff will receive another healthy salary increase.

Something smells off here. However, seeing as there is nothing that I can do about it and to show that I have no hard feelings, I would like to invite the CEO of RMTC and his staff to come down to Kimberley and open an account at the clothing store I almost mentioned earlier.

Many could benefit from this, seeing as I have heard through the grapevine that quite a number of clients, who felt that they are being swindled out of that mysterious R10, have decided to do the right thing and close their accounts.