E-toll system was switched on while public was turned off
ABOUT a year ago on November 19, the Minister of Transport, Dipuo Peters, announced that the e-tolls “on again, off again” confusion would finally be over and the scheme would eventually be launched on December 3 last year.
It was the day that would mark the beginning of the end of a fiasco that should never have happened. After Outa’s successful interdict of the scheme’s launch on April 30, 2012, the protracted legal battle to halt the launch of e-tolling was set aside on a technicality of administration law in September last year.
The Supreme Court (SCA) could not condone the lateness of the application, and as much as we wanted to have our arguments on the unlawfulness of the e-toll scheme heard, the SCA could not do so. These arguments were set aside for the day a motoring citizen would be summonsed by the prosecuting authorities to explain their non-payment of e-toll bills.
The Outa committee met soon after the SCA decision to decide its future.
Our decision to continue the fight was based on the overwhelming evidence and research gathered since 2010 on the Gauteng e-toll scheme and others around the world. We had enough information and insight to argue not only the unlawfulness of the Gauteng e-toll scheme, but also the extent of its irrationality and gross inefficiency which made it virtually unworkable.
We also knew that in the absence of civil society’s ability to keep Sanral honest, they might just manage to hoodwink, coerce, intimidate and threaten enough people to participate in the scheme.
This might have led to e-tag compliance levels high enough to satisfy the authorities, with some degree of success. Our research showed e-tag compliance of less than 85 percent was not sustainable over time. We also knew that Sanral would have deemed a compliance level of 70 percent as being a great success.
As it turned out, society’s courage to defy the unjust system resulted in a peak compliance rate around the 40 percent mark, about seven months after it was launched. Outa believes that much of its work to counter Sanral’s multimillionrand e-toll marketing and propaganda campaign, played a role in empowering society with the knowledge to remain defiant at such a high level.
At first, soon after the scheme was turned on, we received many messages of condolence. People thought the fight was over, purely because the e-toll system was now switched on. We knew we had our work cut out for us to convince the public that because the purple lights were burning, didn’t mean that the users were paying. Our tactics exposed Sanral’s misinformation on the e-tag sales. We counted e-tags on windscreens at freeway offramps and in parking lots and extra- polated our findings to denounce Sanral’s grossly inflated numbers.
We asked politicians to seek clarity of these numbers from the transport minister in Parliament, and our research was vindicated as being accurate to within 1 percent, despite Sanral’s attempts to play down our research. Together with Cosatu, the faith-based organisations and other civil action entities, our messages of civil courage began to sink in.
We attended to every media inquiry and provided input that saw the Advertising Standards Authority rule against Sanral’s misleading advertisements in the middle of this year. Our viral messages and video clips, along with a social media drive, gained traction and the e-toll scheme remained one wherein more users refused to pay than those who did.
By mid-winter, Sanral’s final card to prosecute motorists for non-payment, was about to be played. Outa’s committee met its legal advisers and agreed on a plan to support and fight the prosecution process, if it ever came to be.
Following the Gauteng ANC’s decline at the May elections and recent premier David Makhura’s announcement of an e-toll advisory panel, Peters was wise in her decision to halt Sanral’s plans of e-toll prosecution at the end of June.
Today, the ANC in Gauteng has denounced the scheme, as has the ANC Youth League, the SA Local Government Association and virtually every business and civil society organisation that presented input to the panel. It appears that 11 months after the scheme was given the green light, it is now collapsing at a rapid rate, with the e-tag compliance rate declining toward the 30 percent level and close on R2 billion outstanding in bills.
It is a matter of time for the decision to turn off the farce, one that ought not to have happened in the first place.