Sanral blames e-tolls impasse for R14.5 billion loss

The South African National Roads Agency (Sanral) has blamed its massive annual loss of R14.5 billion – and the ballooning of its liabilities to more than R140 billion – on “the lack of revenue opportunities”, mainly from e-tolls, which motorists are still boycotting.

Sanral general manager of communications and marketing Vusi Mona said that while the impass over e-tolls continued, Sanral had been unable to focus on that “revenue opportunity”.

“The one [opportunity] that leaps out and is controversial at the moment is the e-tolls,” said Mona.

The road agency’s annual loss and spiralling liabilities have led the auditor-general to question the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.

However, Gauteng transport and roads MEC Jacob Mamabolo said the provincial government remained firm on its position that e-tolls should be scrapped, as the system was flawed and made travelling costly for motorists.

“Since the e-tolls have been conceptualised they have never met their financial target in terms of generating revenue for government to build new roads and to maintain existing roads,” Mamabolo said.

He also said the argument that there were losses because people were not paying for e-tolls was baseless and the fact of the matter was e-tolls never met their financial targets.

He said the biggest issue was that, originally, conceptual analysis of e-tolls was flawed because they didn’t take a number of factors into account, including how they were going to generate income if people did not pay .

“The cost of recovering unpaid money is 10 times higher than the money you can recoup,” he said.

Mamabolo also said e-tolls were never going to generate income because they were placed on national roads that were servicing the national economy, international trade, cross-border trade, yet only the people of Gauteng must pay.

“So even when the amounts were reduced, they still did not make their target, so the argument we are making is e-tolls never generated the required revenue to pay the accounts that are there,” he said.

“The contractual obligations, to expand roads, maintain roads, they have never been useful.”

Mona said the problem was that all the money that was collected from e-tolls was paying the service provider but nothing had gone towards the roads.

“There are a number of different reasons for that but, ultimately, the user-pays principle is not being enforced and all they should do really is just add it on to the fuel levy and if they did, it’s an extra 10c and that would have paid for the entire road via the user-pays-principle and that would have been the solution,” he said.

Automobile Association spokesperson Layton Beard said there were other ways to generate revenue apart from e tolls, adding the majority of Gauteng motorists would never pay for e-tolls.

– reitumetse@citizen.co.za Additional reporting by Moneyweb