Truth about e-tolls

“E-toll runaround adds stress to my life” (February 9) by Devi Govender refers.

It reeks of prejudice. The approach was simply: Why let facts get in the way of your prejudice?

So it is with the innuendo from Govender that somehow, somewhere, there was corruption in the awarding of contracts. No proof, just a snide remark. What corruption?

There has never been any proof of any corruption in the awarding of any of the tenders. And that is a fact Govender could easily have checked.

And so it is with the insinuation that somehow money is leaving the country in a corrupt way. The South African National Roads Agency Ltd (Sanral) has many service providers. All get paid for services delivered.

So it is with the Austrian company that has South African partners: the company Electronic Toll Collection manages the e-tolling and gets paid a fee for this service, and if there is enough left to declare a dividend (after paying tax in South Africa), part of that dividend may go to the mother company — as happens with any foreign company that has invested in South Africa.

As for Govender’s inability to navigate our website: we regret that she found it difficult and it is true that with all websites there are occasional problems. But, really, the Sanral website is actually easy to work with.

It does happen that misunderstanding of how the system works causes irritation. In a recent much publicised case, a customer switched e-tags between his vehicles and the result was a flood of responses from Electronic Toll Collection, whose customer service was below par.

It has apologised for this and used the experience to upgrade the service. But the customer contributed to the problem by not using the toll system correctly. —