E-tolls in Gauteng will cripple South Africa’s economy, the Justice Project SA said on Monday.<\/p>\n
“This will cripple the economy of Gauteng and indeed South Africa as a whole,” JPSA chairman Howard Dembovsky told public hearings in Midrand on the impact of e-tolls.<\/p>\n
“It will create the socio-economic disaster of the millennium and we will see people hanging themselves from these beautiful gantries.”<\/p>\n
He said people who were prosecuted for not paying tolls would have a criminal record, which would affect their livelihoods.<\/p>\n
This could mean people losing their jobs, going to jail, or getting into debt to pay the fines.<\/p>\n
Dembovsky presented the panel with three case studies to show the impact tolls would have on people who had not paid tolls or bought e-tags.<\/p>\n
“[If people go to jail] we will then have successfully completed the cycle and turned artificial criminals into real criminals,” Dembovsky said.<\/p>\n
Not only would non-payers have to pay the outstanding fees, but also civil penalties of R1,000 for each gantry passed.<\/p>\n
He said the SA National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) was “partially correct” about people not paying for e-tolls.<\/p>\n
Sanral has said not paying e-tolls was both a traffic and criminal offence and people would be prosecuted.<\/p>\n
Dembovsky told the panel a Sanral official had said South Africa would become a “banana republic” if tolls were not paid.<\/p>\n
“We said to them whatever you’re smoking we want some, because these are a lot of offences.”<\/p>\n
He said as from May 31, R1.1 billion in e-toll fees had not been paid and of the 2.5 million people who used the highways under the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP), only half had been registered.<\/p>\n
Sanral waited too long to start the prosecutions, he said.<\/p>\n
E-tolls should be scrapped and a fuel levy should be introduced.<\/p>\n
“If e-tolls [are] retained, at least hundreds of thousands of e-toll offenders will be prosecuted,” he said.<\/p>\n
Neither Sanral nor the National Prosecuting Authority could decide whether to prosecute an offender or not, he said.<\/p>\n
“They don’t have the discretion to select a few cases in order to set examples.”<\/p>\n
“We also don’t live in Egypt. The courts may not hold mass trials. It is highly likely that court cases might take days to complete.”<\/p>\n
Dembovsky said if a fuel levy of 14 cents\/litre was introduced Sanral would be able to repay its debt sooner.<\/p>\n
Sanral in general was good at building and maintaining good roads and should manage national, provincial, and local roads, Dembovsky said.<\/p>\n
He said e-tolls should be scrapped and replaced with a “true user-pays principle”.<\/p>\n
“If we don’t do it we are heading for an epic socio-economic disaster.”<\/p>\n
The hearings are expected to address the economic and social impacts of the GFIP and e-tolls. The panel is expected to present a report of its findings to premier David Makhura at the end of November.<\/p>\n
Civil society was making presentations at the hearings from Monday until Wednesday.<\/p>\n
E-tolls toxic to small business growth<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n E-tolling has improved traffic: Cesa<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n