Back in December 2013 these E-Toll Gantries made their first appearance on the national roads around Johannesburg. I was on holiday in the United States at the time but we all had heard the rumors that it was going to happen.
I think what got to me and everyone else is that these roads had already been here for decades and the greedy politicians thought it was legal to just add a toll fee for everyone to pay. Normally anywhere else in the world a toll road is an alternative route that is faster and shorter saving you time and money and why you pay for the service. Not a road you use every day and has been there since year dot as that is criminal to even contemplate doing such an act.
I would have taken a photo of what I was owing to the E-Tolls as it was well over R200K or around $12K, but when we moved the last time I never informed them of my new address. I suspect it was closer to R300K now but thankfully that has all been fixed.
The Government last week announced that they were scrapping the entire system and that no fees will be owed fi you haven't paid. Can you believe it some idiots actually signed up and paid monthly to use a road that has always been there. This is them doing a favor when they were the ones who implemented this in the first place.
They implemented the system in the first place and now they welcome the decision?
The story is they linked up with a Belgium company who were making 65% of the total revenue and the rest would be kept to create and subsidize the Government pension plan. That 65% would have been peanuts as no one or very few besides car hire companies were paying the fees. Government vehicles like Ambulances, fire engines and police cars also paid as they are part of the system.
Gauteng will take on 30% of Sanral's R47 billion debt, while the government will pay the remaining 70%.
Only reason why they are in debt is because people refused to pay. The roads are in a shocking state so they can't say they used funds to repair the infrastructure either.
Over the years we have had roadblocks across the entire highway blocking traffic scanning number plates and threatening those that owed with prison sentences and bad credit scores. The bully boy tactics never worked and no one fell for these antics as the truth is we couldn't afford to drive on the roads anymore if we had to pay these ridiculous amounts of money. You can only squeeze so much juice out of an orange before it runs dry. Businesses would use apps to avoid the tolls as they just couldn't compete with others as the prices added up too quickly.
A friend of mine who owns a large trucking company with 100 plus trucks charged his clients a toll fee which he kept one side just in case he had to pay this. I know that 9 years later he must have a cool $10 million jackpot bonanza sitting there which he can now keep. He was a smart and used it to his benefit as many of his clients it would have been a tax write off anyway so was only robbing the system. This was like the perfect crime and was a business on it's own when you think about the numbers involved.
