As anger over Gauteng’s e-tolls intensified this week, the company operating the controversial tolling system has revealed that a staggering 170 000 e-tags have been bought in the past few days alone.
And Salahdin Yacoubi, the CEO of the Electronic Tolling Collection (ETC) consortium, claimed that figure could swell to 1 million.
Yacoubi had told the Saturday Star on Thursday that e-tag sales had reached 330 000, but announced yesterday that sales had exceeded 500 000 and that he anticipated this to exceed 1 million units by April 30 when e-tolling on the province’s major highways begins.
But the backlash is mounting. This week, the Road Freight Association, whose 700-strong membership services most of the country’s retailers, joined the court action by the Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance (Outa), seeking to interdict the imminent implementation of the project.
“We brought two other matters to the court action that we felt needed to be urgently considered alongside the application by Outa to interdict the e-tolling,” said Gavin Kelly, the spokesman for the association.
“The first one is related to Sanral’s draft regulations seeking changes to the National Roads Act to give the agency employees police powers by declaring them peace officers. This is blatantly unconstitutional in our view.”
Sanral published its draft regulations on March 27, seeking to enable CEO Nazir Alli to appoint staff to take steps to prevent offences and contraventions of the National Roads Act. In terms of the proposed regulations, employees will have the powers of arrest and detention such as those conferred on police in terms of the Criminal Procedure Act.
Tariffs published in the Government Gazette detailing punitive charges of R1.75 a kilometre for motorists with no e-tags has also drawn the ire of motorists.
The freight association is challenging the newly published tariffs. “We believe that the punitive tariffs are too prejudicial to people who don’t have e-tags and our argument is that they amount to unfair competition because Sanral has the monopoly over the roads,” Kelly added.
In Sanral’s answering affidavit to the opposition alliance’s application, it argues that the government made its intentions of tolling known since 2007 and that an interdict to stop it could ultimately compromise SA’s credit rating.
Yesterday, the opposition alliance was due to lodge its replying affidavits.
Wayne Duvenage, its spokes-man, said: “We cannot say much regarding our responses to Sanral’s replying affidavits to the application we lodged, but we were not surprised by the bulk of what they said. We are as confident as we were in the beginning that our grounds for the urgent interdict of e-tolls are sound.”
Cosatu had also joined the court action through a “watching brief”, said spokesman Patrick Craven.
“They will be present in court when the hearing begins on Tuesday. If there is a need to intervene at a later stage we will do so… In fact, we are more concerned now that we have seen the evasive response by Sanral regarding what the costs of operating the tolls and ensuring compliance will be.”
ETC’s Yacoubi admitted that his company would only be paid “minimum incentives for doing well” in the implementation of the tolls.
“Whether we collect R1 or R1 billion doesn’t affect our remuneration,” he said.
ETC will manage the entire e-tolling collection, including account management, financial transaction settlements, transponder logistics and testing; system and equipment maintenance, facilities and violation processing.
Last year The Star reported that ETC was awarded a contract of more than R2bn for eight years.
ETC, which is also known as TMT Services and Supplies, and Austrian company Kapsch bought majority shares in ETC a few months after being awarded the e-tolling tender.
Yacoubi stressed that it collected tolls on Sanral’s behalf. “The monies collected go directly to Sanral for them to pay costs such as capital repayment, interest, maintenance and operations… But if we don’t meet some of their conditions prescribed in our contract with Sanral we get penalised.”
He added the toll system was designed and developed to handle the more than two million road transactions a day. His company had additional measures in place to offset any residual shortcomings of the e-Natis system by collecting 40 percent of toll fees by camera using vehicle registration numbers.
“Capacity of payment collection is planned with enough flexibility to enable agile adaptation to any scenario,” he explained. “In addition, road users are being offered grace periods and other incentives for them to settle their accounts, and for those who elect not to do so, would be exposed to law-enforcement measures.”
Yacoubi warned that road side enforcement and prosecutions would be “ramped up” in accordance with requirements to ensure compliance from the beginning. - Saturday Star