South Africa will in future be inundated with costly e-tolls. This is not just a Gauteng issue. As Nazir Alli, CEO of Sanral, recently said in Durban on 6 March, and repeated on the steps of the Cape High Court, he wants to convert “all South Africa’s toll roads to e-tolls”. Not only this, but more tolls roads are already being investigated by Sanral to add to the already numerous toll roads around the country. All provinces will ultimately be affected…
…The South African National Road Agency Limited (Sanral) misleads us by stating that the road maintenance backlog is about R149 billion, which means that we have to have many new toll roads across the country to fix government’s mess. Unfortunately for the argument, the math doesn’t add up. The studies by the Automobile Association (AA), and the Southern African Bitumen Association (SABITA), point out the problem, but if you look at the annual budget documents supplied by Treasury and the annual audits supplied by the Auditor General, you can clearly see that between 2003 and 2008, an average of more than R21 billion was brought in from the fuel levy, per annum while only an average of R7.4 billion was spent on the roads! That leaves R14 billion wasted by this government on other projects. If you approximate R14 billion per annum from 1994, until around 2010, that gives an approximate R238 billion of fuel levy money misused by this government. We only need, according to Sanral in 2013, R149 billion to cater for the road maintenance backlog. Government spent the money elsewhere and now pretends that we have to pay tolls to afford our roads. ….
South Africa Today – South Africa News
