All roads (building) lead to looting

The Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project was an egregious rip-off from the start and required insane leaps of logic and massaging of the numbers of justify – so it is not surprising that the figures of debt owed still do not make sense.

The project – to resurface the province’s highway network and expand it by, at most, two lanes and build a few new interchanges – cost R20 billion for 201km, or close to R100 million a kilometre.

At the time, ahead of the 2010 Fifa World Cup, that cost per kilometre was almost twice what it would have cost to build a four-lane highway from scratch in an urban area in the United States, according to American civil engineering figures.

To get back the outrageous overcharge required setting toll fees so high – and collecting them electronically, which cost even more money – that motorists rebelled.

That consumer rebellion forced the cancellation of e-tolls and, theoretically, saddled Gauteng with a huge debt.

ALSO READ: End date for e-tolls decided – here’s when the gantries will be switched off

Despite the billions raised from those who were intimidated into paying – and they will not be reimbursed, according to Gauteng finance MEC Lebogang Maile – the total debt is now more than double the cost of construction: an eye-watering R43 billion.

Is that a genuine figure or did the SA National Roads Agency Limited palm off other road-building costs from elsewhere?

Even though national government is picking up 70% of that, Gauteng’s 30% still amounts to more than the original cost.

Yet Maile is still trying to insist the silly principle of user pays must be continued, otherwise there will be no other way to pay for infrastructure.

No, comrade, that’s what our taxes are there for.

ALSO READ: E-tolls: Gauteng government to make first debt payment in September – Maile

If you and your colleagues were not engaged in weapons-grade looting of the fiscus, then there might be enough to build world-class, toll-free roads.