Cape Town - Parliament’s portfolio committee on transport has been accused of “spin” by the Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance after claiming the alliance was not opposed to e-tolling.
In a statement issued on Tuesday after a presentation by the alliance, the committee said the alliance was not opposed to e-tolling because people needed to pay to have good road infrastructure. However, Wayne Duvenage, the chairman of the alliance, which has changed its name to the Organisation Uniting against Tax Abuse, said this was ”blatant spin and the government are misinforming the public in this statement”.
“It is a complete fabrication of the points I put forward. I made it clear that we are not opposed to the fact that all infrastructure must ultimately be paid for by society and they have ‘spun’ this into statements that say we are now for e-tolls,” he said.
Duvenage stressed the alliance was advocating paying for infrastructure through efficient mechanisms, such as taxation and fuel levies.
He said the e-toll mechanism had failed, it was inefficient and only nine percent of road users were paying their e-toll bills.
“It has therefore failed as a user-pays scheme,” he said.
Duvenage said the government’s resistance to paying for the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Programme through an increase in the fuel levy because the levy hurt the poor more was “hypocritical”, because the fuel levy had increased by 92 percent in the eight years since construction started on the GFIP in 2008.
The government would have been able to finance the GFIP cash through a nine cents a litre increase in the fuel levy, he said. A copy of the alliance’s presentation indicated it did not oppose the need for the public and society to pay for roads and also did not denounce the benefits of intelligent transport systems and e-toll technology.
But it said the e-toll system on the GFIP was an administratively burdensome scheme, inefficient and cumbersome and involved “a shocking public engagement process”.
It said the government had suffered a crisis of legitimacy because it was unable to enforce its own laws, the e-toll system was further alienating the people from the government and the South African National Roads Agency Limited suffered credit rating downgrades.