One wonders if the ANC – whose idea it was in the first place – is going to learn anything from the Gauteng e-toll debacle?
The painful humiliation of being faced down and beaten by your own citizens is still there – as evidenced by the news Cabinet has agreed to write off R29 billion spent on the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP).
E-tolls were set up to pay back that money in what the government and the SA National Roads Agency (Sanral) thought would be a simple fleecing of motorists, rationalised by the mantra “user pays”.
Manifestly, the users of the freeways believed that the tolls were not usage fees but an extra tax on top of an already onerous burden of money due to the state.
The user pays principle may well have worked, though, had Sanral and the road construction companies not been so nakedly greedy over the years toll roads have been in operation.
A tame Sanral transport economist once went so far as putting an absurd value on the time Gauteng drivers spent commuting to justify the outrageous tolls.
The fees had to be so high because the freeway improvements cost more than equivalent projects would have anywhere else in the world.
The GFIP was an attempt to privatise a state function – for the benefit of the connected elite – and the resistance by millions of motorists marked a turning point in South African politics… the place where the ANC government of the time was told not to rip off its own people.
In announcing the writing off of the GFIP debt, it was sad to see the government still clinging to the discredited principle of user pays.
We hope that doesn’t mean future get-rich-quick projects which we, as taxpayers, will end up paying for.
