Parliament – The Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance (Outa) on Tuesday accused Parliament’s portfolio committee on transport of grossly misleading the public with a statement suggesting the pressure group had softened its stance on e-tolls.
Outa chairman Wayne Duvenhage told ANA: “It is absolutely false. I am livid.”
Duvenhage said he had given a presentation to MPs explaining that his organisation accepted that road users must pay for infrastructure, but believed this should be done through a fuel levy, not e-tolling.
“I opened my presentation by saying we accept that all infrastructure must be paid for ultimately through taxes. I then spent a 30-slide presentation explaining why e-tolling was the wrong mechanism and the fuel levy the right mechanism.”
Duvenhage said he would demand that the committee retract a statement it had issued after the meeting titled “Outa not opposed to e-tolls”.
“They did not listen to anything I said and then they put this spin on it.”
The statement from the committee claimed that Duvenhage had accepted the user-pay-principle, but taken issue with a lack of consultation when the e-toll system was introduced.
It added that the acting chairman of the committee, Leonard Ramatlakane, had “welcomed OUTA’s position and said there seemed to be general agreement on the necessity for improved and well maintained infrastructure”.
Ramatlakane then advised Outa that there had been a number of consultative processes in Gauteng regarding e-tolls and advised Outa to say so if it felt that these had been inadequate.
“The issue of consultations is open for discussions as a number of them happened in Gauteng over a period of time. The (Gauteng) Premier was involved at some point as well as Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa. If the claim is that they were not adequate, then Outa should be clear in making that case,” Ramatlakane said.
He said the committee would respond to complaints from Outa of collusive behaviour during the construction of the Gauteng freeway improvement project by asking the South African National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) for an update on how it intended to proceed against the companies that had been implicated.
Outa has spent years in court trying to halt e-tolling, which appears to remain contentious, even within government. In May last year, Ramaphosa announced that tolling fees would be drastically reduced, a few months after Gauteng premier David Makhura urged an official review of the system.
African News Agency
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