SA National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) chief executive Nazir Alli’s resignation has left stakeholders mystified about its timing, but more confident about a resolution being found to the impasse over electronic tolling in Gauteng.
Wayne Duvenage, the chairman of the Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance, which obtained a temporary court interdict to halt the implementation of e-tolling, said yesterday that Sanral was likely to become more engaging and embracing and more willing to listen after Alli’s departure.
Duvenage said Alli was the epitome of the e-tolling problem, because he was the individual making lots of decisions and policy, and the e-tolling backlash was probably the catalyst for his resignation.
Although the alliance is still fully committed to its legal challenge and a full court review to halt e-tolling as the funding mechanism for Gauteng’s freeway improvements, Duvenage said it was keen to work with the authorities to resolve this matter to circumvent the further waste of taxpayers’ money on court battles.
He admitted there was also a need to restore the credibility of Sanral and the country’s ability to raise the necessary finance facilities at the best rates to get the country’s road-building programme back on track, but indicated this would only happen once there was agreement between all the parties on the way forward.
Cosatu spokesman Patrick Craven did not believe Alli’s resignation would result in any legal or technical change to the e-tolling issue, but he said it was symbolic.
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He was the face of e-tolling and his disappearance will be symbolic of the scrapping in the end of the project he personified,” he said.
Craven said Alli came across in his public statements as trying to bully people into registering for e-tolling and buying e-tags, which made people even more opposed to the e-tolling project.
He added that Alli was unable to listen “to voices that got louder and louder” and had reiterated the same standard line that e-tolling was going to go ahead.
“In a democracy that doesn’t work,” Craven said.
He did not want to speculate on why Alli had decided to resign now, after months of stiff opposition to e-tolling.
Duvenage said Alli’s resignation might be related to a combination of “the heat at the moment and some inquiries going on into the decisions that were made”.
The SA Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors expressed disappointment at Alli’s resignation and acknowledged the positive contributions he had made to improving the country’s road infrastructure, adding that it was concerned about the impact his exit could have on future road infrastructure development.
Lobby group AfriForum said that Alli was not the only person responsible for the e-tolling debacle and the political leaders under whose control the project was being conducted should also be held accountable.
Tembakazi Mnyaka, the chairman of Sanral’s board, said yesterday it had received and accepted Alli’s resignation at its meeting on Monday, but Alli had agreed to continue in his post until June 3.
Mnyaka said the immediate focus and priority of the board now was to ensure that Sanral continued to perform its essential role in operating and maintaining more than 16 000km of national roads across South Africa.
Prior to becoming the chief executive of Sanral, Alli was a chief director at the national Transport Department from 1995 until 1998, served as the principal engineer of Ninham Shand from 1982 to 1994, and was an engineer at the World Bank in the US in 1993.