Enough with e-toll excuses, Mbaks

The ANC’s equivalent of the “cheque is in the mail” delaying tactic has to be “the decision on the future of e-tolls is imminent”. That was what we heard almost a year ago when Twitter-prone Minister of Transport Fikile Mbalula said he had been “given a mandate” by President Cyril Ramaphosa to come up with a solution.

To be fair to Mbaks, it will not be an easy decision. Already, only one in five motorists is paying e-tolls and the civil disobedience – which has been running since the launch of the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project toll system almost seven years ago – is something the ANC has little political will to challenge.

There is also no money in government’s coffers to plug the leaks in the SA National Roads Agency (Sanral) e-toll revenue bucket. Now, according to the minister, the Covid-19 pandemic has been the cause of another major delay in the resolution of the e-toll dilemma.

It is interesting, however, that, only a fortnight before Ramaphosa put the country into lockdown in March, ANC Gauteng premier David Makhura said he had been assured by the president that the scheme would be scrapped.

Another political complication for the ANC is that its staunch ally, the Congress of SA Trade Unions, to whom it kowtows at the slightest nudge, is steadfastly opposed to open-road tolling. This despite the ruling party’s attempts to claim that the majority of the “working class” are unaffected by the tolling system.

The crunch has now come because Sanral needs to borrow money to improve road infrastructure in the rest of the country. And it doesn’t exactly look like a good risk, given that it is not getting its anticipated e-toll revenue.

Whatever happens, the ANC must learn from this debacle, for future reference, that South Africans don’t like being dictated to.

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