Wayne Duvenage on e-tolls: It was a far bigger fight than I anticipated

When then Avis chief executive Wayne Duvenage walked out the doors for the last time in April 2012 to launch the Opposition Against Urban Tolling Alliance (Outa), he never imagined the scope – and size – of the fight he was setting himself up for.

“It was a far bigger fight than I anticipated. I really thought at the time government would come to its senses within a number of months. Maybe a year,” Duvenage says.

“But I knew I needed to give this matter full-time attention. I couldn’t play the role of chief executive of Avis with the Outa challenge.”

With the SA National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) then preparing to launch open-road electronic toll collection for the R20-billion Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project in a few months, Duvenage says there was a lot of confusion and people did not know how to handle issues or what they should be doing.

‘We had a lot of work to do’

“We had a lot of work to do; to educate them and empower them with what their rights were; to engage them through the media to challenge the Sanral propaganda machine at the time,” he said.

“There was so much happening but I did think the wrath of the public and the outcry would be enough to get government to come to their senses; to sit down and find the solution at that time, which is the solution they have introduced now – the exact solution we were proposing.”

Ironically, the R20-billion project’s debt had ballooned to R47 billion by the time Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana pulled the plug on the ailing project this week.

Except, back in 2013-14, Duvenage says, government was stubborn, arrogant and the fight went on a lot longer than he anticipated.

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Sanral was preparing for its December 2013 launch, after an Outa challenge in the courts had allowed Sanral to continue because the roads had been built and money had been borrowed.

“But the courts also allowed us a collateral challenge. We could defend the public if there were ever a summons,” he said.

This put Outa in the role of a public defender and Duvenage swore to challenge summonses, which were issued to so-called noncompliant road users.

Duvenage says at the time, his legal team was headed by Gilbert Marcus, who was Outa’s senior counsel on e-tolls.

Marcus assured them they would fight this matter one case at a time and would defend every citizen until they acquired a win.

“Because one win in court becomes a precedent for everybody else. And that is the journey we went on and that gave the moral courage to civil society.”

Subsequently, e-tolls became the longest-running campaign in modern SA on an unprecedented scale.

Duvenage says in June 2014, compliance levels went up to about 40% and when former premier David Makhura announced his advisory panel would look into the economic impact of the e-tolls scheme, it signalled some uncertainty on the scheme’s future.

“We grasped that quickly and started, through a social media drive, the narrative that now we need to stand strong. We could see the compliance levels dropping off every day and month since then,” Duvenage says.

“By the end of 2015, it reached about 25% and in 2016, it went down to 20%. Today, it sits at 15%, which will probably drop off to zero in the next week or so.”

One of Outa’s biggest wins has been having SAA board chair Dudu Myeni declared a delinquent director.

Accused of bringing the embattled airline to its knees and based on her actions during her five-year tenure as chair of the SAA board, Myeni was declared a delinquent director and banned from holding any directorship position for life by Judge Ronel Tolmay in 2020.

“Myeni was on various boards and we believed it was necessary to have her declared such so former president Jacob Zuma could not move her from board to board and infiltrate these boards the way she had done,” Duvenage says.

E-tolls fight an intense journey so far

While still keeping an eye on e-tolls as it crumbles, Duvenage and the Outa team still have their hands full as the rebranded Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse.

“Corruption has not stopped. In fact, it has got worse at provincial and local government,” he says.

“Civil society will become the masters of their own destinies when it comes to managing local government and we need to empower them to do so effectively. We will continue to tackle corruption as the main element of Outa’s work.”

It has been an intense journey so far, Duvenage says.

“It has been a tough journey. When I left the corporate world, which comes with all its trappings and travel when I was the chief executive at Avis, you do not get those benefits when running an organisation such as Outa.

“There were about three and half years that I had no salary and lived off family savings. We have gone through a tough time but I could not have done this without my wife and family who stood with me all this time; who knew it was the right thing to do.”

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But he believes it was worth every minute and refuses to walk away from the challenge of seeing clean governance.

“It was tough, with personal strains and stresses that we had to go through, but here we are. This is a big win for society and a formidable civil action organisation which has been established and we hope to grow this and do more,” says Duvenage.

“It has been a very rewarding one from a moral courage perspective and it will see civil society win against government.”

– news@citizen.co.za