E-tolls: A tale of arrogance, cynical manipulation and possible collusion

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.” Those words of Jesus, as quoted in the Bible, emphasise the supposed separation between church and state.

They have also been used, at various times, to justify blind acceptance of state authority and even frequent abuse of that authority. I was raised in a conservative, Catholic family and taught – at school and by the priests in Catechism classes – that obeying the law was the duty of a good Christian.

Only later, with education and experience did I discover that the society I was ordered to defend as a 18-year-old just out of school was immoral in the sense that it treated people differently on the basis of their colour.

But even now, decades later, I still follow the rules. I pay my taxes, I stick to the speed limit (and when I don’t, I pay the fines) and we renew our TV licence every year. With the arrival of e-tolls (which went into operation in December 2013), I and many others were confronted with a dilemma.

This new system was bulldozed through, with only sham consultation and would, in effect, be a form of “double taxation”, by forcing Gauteng motorists to pay for roads they had already paid for through their taxes.

I also knew the shameful modern history of tolling in this country. Originally, it was based on the American turnpike model – where the private sector would build a brand new road, operate it as a tollroad to recover its investment and make a reasonable profit and then return it to the state after a certain period.

The theory was that, in this way, badly needed infrastructure could be built without having to commit scarce government funds. Initially, that was the intention of the planners in the local department of roads, which later became the SA National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral). When the first private investment toll roads were built, in the late ’80s in KwaZulu-Natal, the charges were based on the American model, which declared the amount would be around 80% of the money saved in fuel using the new road over an existing alternative.

At that time, the law also stipulated that motorists who did not want to pay tolls should have a viable alternative route and that existing roads would not be tolled. The hugely powerful construction industry lobby began rolling back these restrictions systematically, in co-operation with the then National Party government.

The move away from rail transport to road haulage meant that there was an increasingly lucrative market for toll roads.

Once the industry had successfully lobbied for the removal of alternative routes, it then began greedily eyeing existing infrastructure. And, suddenly, open road tolling was proposed for the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project.

As an aside, the costs to effectively broaden the existing freeways by one lane and upgrade interchanges cost almost double – at R100 million a kilometre – than it would have at the time (2010) cost to build a four-lane highway from scratch in an urban area in the US. But that’s another story…

The story of e-tolls is one of arrogance, of cynical manipulation by big companies in possible collusion with the dodgy ANC. It was a tax by stealth and fundamentally immoral. That’s why it attracted the biggest consumer boycott in South African history and our most prolonged period of civil disobedience. Lesson for the ANC: we will no longer blindly render unto Caesar…

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