E-tolls always destined to fail – Outa
THE Gauteng Electronic Toll (e-tolls) collection scheme should never have happened in the first place as it was always destined for failure, despite the government forcing it down the throats of citizens.
This is the view of the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) which has battled since 2012 to have the scheme scrapped.
Wayne Duvenage, CEO of Outa, said that the signs of failure of the project had been evident in 2014, but it has since taken the government another seven years to do away with e-tolls.
In 2019 Outa slammed the Austrian-owned Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) company’s proposals to write-off past e-toll debt if road users agreed to paying e-tolls.
Duvenage said it was a desperate attempt to keep their business interests alive in South Africa.
“It should never have got to this, the e-toll was always going to fail, but I suppose they had to go through the motions to see if they can make it work and they tried very hard to force this down the throats of the citizens but it didn’t work.
“Now they need to be a lot clearer and a lot more transparent on how they’re going to finance the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP),” Duvenage said.
He said that they could accept the R43.031 billion figure that was attributed to GFIP, especially as the Sanral court papers reflected in early 2012, when the GFIP construction was virtually complete, that the GFIP capital cost amounted to R20.63bn.
“There’s a lot of numbers being thrown around, but I don’t think anybody understands what they’re talking about when it comes to how much money is required to be funded by the Treasury and by the Gauteng province.
“The Gauteng freeway road construction debt is not R43bn as Sanral indicates, it’s a lot less. The amount of money that was borrowed was R20bn and that was well above what it should’ve been,” Duvenage said.
He said R20bn was nearly three times what it should have been, due to construction corruption, collusion and Sanral’s incompetence.
“If you take that R20bn and add up the interest, it doesn’t even come to R33bn and we know that they (Sanral) have already received R22bn from the Treasury since 2012 for this freeway.
“What have they done with that money? Why does Gauteng have to fund massive debt that Sanral is not transparent about?” Duvenage asked.
He said that they wanted to know what was going on before Gauteng could commit itself to funding their part of the freeway project.
Gauteng Actionsa chairperson, Bongani Baloyi said the collection of e-tolls should have been ceased immediately following the announcement that the state would take over a portion of Sanral’s debt.
“Actionsa is concerned about how the Gauteng government intends to pay for its share of 30% of Sanral debt, as the province does not have any other revenue streams to fund non-budgetary items other than the funding it receives from the national government.
“Money for municipal grants may be used to pay for a political mistake, instead of its intended purpose which is to serve the poor,” Baloyi said.
He said Actionsa would continue to place pressure on the Gauteng provincial government to ensure a speedy cancellation of e-tolls to ensure that the residents of the province were no longer burdened by an ANC mistake.