Mboweni ‘dreaming’ if he thinks e-tolling will work – Outa’s Duvenage

If you were hoping for a top-tier decision on the e-toll fiasco plaguing Gauteng to be taken by Finance Minister Tito Mboweni, you are out of luck.

Mboweni was explicit on Wednesday during his budget speech when he referred to infrastructure development: “Our great dams, bridges and railway lines have supported our economy for decades. However, much of this infrastructure now needs repair or replacement.”

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Government has committed to a R791.2 billion infrastructure investment drive to this end.

Here’s where Mboweni adroitly dodged the multibillion-rand question about the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project, now about R15 billion in the red, according to the auditor-general in November: “However, all these efforts to expand infrastructure will be wasted if the end user does not pay a cost-reflective tariff for usage.”

Campaigner against e-tolls, Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) chief executive Wayne Duvenage, said on Wednesday, in principle, he wasn’t against e-tolls.

“There’s always a user pays principle. If I put my light on, I must pay electricity. Nobody bemoans the principle.

“However, you have to start asking questions, like what is social infrastructure and what is user pays infrastructure,” Duvenage said.

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“If I use more water, I must pay more, but how do you switch off a road? That is the problem.”

Duvenage said the use-now-pay-later scheme introduced was “impossible”.

“If you cannot manage or enforce regulations and laws, you have to find an alternative,” Duvenage said.

“[Mboweni] might be saying that, but he can’t refer to e-tolls because it has failed. If he thinks it will work, he’s dreaming.”

And while Mboweni made light of a “tax revolt”, outgoing chief executive of the Institute of Race Relations Frans Cronje didn’t see a funny side.

Cronje warned government risked triggering “a tax revolt that will see South Africans, where possible, redirect their taxes to bypass the state”, if the country continued on its current path.

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“Our very strong sense is that communities and businesses will look to provide their own services and many effective and legal avenues exist to do this.

“Should government clamp down on such avenues, the effect will be to hound taxpayers out of the country.”

It was “unsustainable to think taxpayers would continue to put up with a government whose policies hounded investment out of the country and then went on to loot what revenues remain, while taking little action to bring the corrupt to book”.

“The tax-to-GDP ratio is now the highest in SA’s history and is causing considerable trauma across households struggling to afford goods and services ranging from their bond payments to their children’s school fees,” he said.

amandaw@citizen.co.za

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