OUTA’s fight against e-tolls reboots after court losses

The fight against e-tolling suffered a setback when the Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance lost in the Supreme Court of Appeals and decided not to appeal that decision. But according to OUTA’s Wayne Duvenhage, the fight isn’t over. Instead, says Duvenhage, it will now shift to a citizens’ fight. Although OUTA has denied urging civil disobedience, it’s pretty clear that they think people should be slow to pay the tolls when they are implemented. Certainly OUTA has encouraged South Africans not to buy e-tolling tags, which, points out Duvenhage, are not legally required. And, although they would never say so, it’s clear that OUTA hopes that if people refuse to buy the tags, the whole e-tolling system will become almost unmanageable. Be sure to check out OUTA’s video, which can be seen in the video clip linked to here. – FD

To watch this video on CNBC’s Power Lunch click here

ALEC HOGG:  Well, it was a couple of weeks ago that we had Bernie Krone from Esorfranki in the studio and as he was leaving I mentioned that we’d be talking to Wayne Duvenhage very shortly thereafter.  He grumbled about ‘what’s wrong with you guys?  Why don’t you buy e-tolls?  I’ve bought many for my family, etcetera’.  Now, you’d expect that from a man in the construction industry.  I asked Wayne Duvenhage, who was next up, what he thought of what Esorfranki’s Chief Executive had to say and clearly, he wasn’t terribly impressed.  Well, we managed to get Wayne in the studio now.  A bit of the pressure is off you.  That day, you had just come out of court.  It was a bad day in your life, I guess.

WAYNE DUVENHAGE:  Not necessarily, it’s a process and it was a bit of a setback, but I think the court process is still going to be unfolding in a different light, going forward.  The unlawfulness issue has not been argued and the courts have still left that open, so if it’s a technical issue that they want to hang this case on – that’s fine.  It’s not over.  The e-tolling matter still has a lot of dealing and wrangling to go through.

ALEC HOGG:  It’s really interesting what you’ve done, because you fought the case in a court of public opinion as well as in the court of law, so the court of law is continuing and the court of public opinion…  You actually fired a very big bullet recently with a video that has come out which I would have wondered ‘why is it taking so long?’  Watching that video – and we’re going to play it in the next few minutes – it unpacks things really well.

WAYNE DUVENHAGE:  It does, you know.  We’ve been focused mainly on the court battle, but you can’t be outside of the court of public opinion.  You have to play in the social media space.  You have to explain yourself and we’ve been dealing with many press releases, arguing, and countering a lot of the stuff that SANRAL have been putting out there.  Then, a little while ago,…a couple of months ago, somebody asked us, “How can you just package what you’re saying?  What are the issues around e-tolling and can you put this into a short AV – a three minute AV?”  We said, “Alright, this is what it’s about”.  We read it out and then they worked on it and they went ahead and produced it and it actually turned out to be six minutes, but we said, “You can’t shorten it.  That’s the story, so let’s see what happens with six minutes”.  Normally six minutes is long and people don’t watch it, but this has been surprising.  It has just taken off and within three weeks, we’ve seen nearly 300,000 views with about 94 percent of the ratio of likes to dislikes – 96 percent actually liking it.  You’re quite right.  It would have been nice to have put that out earlier, but there are some things in there that have only come to light recently, so it’s quite up to day and it really does tell the story.

ALEC HOGG:  Well, 300.000 people have watched this clip.  We have it.  We received permission from OUTA to actually play it and maybe you’re one of those that haven’t seen it, so we’re going to play it for you right now.

ALEC HOGG:  Well, now you can understand why more than 300,000 people have watched it on YouTube, and I think it’s only just starting.  Wayne, you must have watched that video many times.

WAYNE DUVENHAGE:  Yes, a few times and I like to go on there every now and then just to see what the viewership is looking like, and it’s climbing by about 5000 per day, so it’s really rocketing.

ALEC HOGG:  There were many home truths in there, things that as a financial journalist I wasn’t aware of: for instance, how much Gauteng contributes to the public pot.  That’s has certainly been, from outside of this province, one of the arguments.

WAYNE DUVENHAGE:  Absolutely…this is the one argument that government keeps throwing at us.  Why should someone in Limpopo or the Eastern Cape pay towards Gauteng’s roads?  Gauteng is paying for their roads, their schools, their clinics.  This concentrated region/province is the breadbasket and the economic hub of this country.  Quite frankly if this province needed 185km of ten-lane highways to get people to and from work quickly, productive earning taxes, earning revenue and taking goods to and from markets, then give this province which is very concentrated, it’s highways/transport networks.  It just makes sense.  This is not, incidentally, a completely new road infrastructure.  This was really just resurfacing and an extra lane put in with a couple of extra lanes here and there and some interchanges that were done.  These are things that government should have been providing for years ago because you need to upgrade your infrastructure to keep pace with the growing economy, so it’s really a futile argument that ‘the user pays’ because it’s not really a ‘user pay’ system.  It’s an ‘owner pay’ system’, which makes it even more administratively cumbersome.  This means that your son who has a car in your name…you have to watch those accounts, too.  If he doesn’t pay, you are locked up.  It is just crazy.  It is an administrative burden like you cannot believe.

ALEC HOGG:  What happens now?  Are you telling people not to buy e-tags?

WAYNE DUVENHAGE:  Well, it’s not law to get an e-tag.  What we’re seeing is that society is now sitting up and saying, “Well, here is our first chance, our first real opportunity to say to government: if you don’t listen…  If you do not allow us to participate in plans like this and help us influence it” – because we could have done a lot of influencing – “then you must be prepared for the backlash” and we’re seeing this backlash building up.  People are saying, “We’re not going to get tagged”, and even more onerous for government is that we’re seeing statements made by the churches.  The last time churches became involved in condemning government policy was in the Apartheid days, and this is one they’re standing up on, and they’re saying/recommending: don’t get tags.  Don’t even pay your bills.  This is something that government has to answer to.

ALEC HOGG:  What’s the likely outcome of all of this if you have civil disobedience?  We are a law-abiding society.  Well, we hope.  Many of us try to be law-abiding citizens in this society.  Our church is telling us, “Don’t pay”.

WAYNE DUVENHAGE:  Alec, there’s a saying: “laws and rules are only as good as they are governable and they’re practical”.  This is not practical.  If they want to force it into being, they must deal with the unintended consequences, and they are quite a lot.  One of them is civil society saying ‘no way.  We’re not going there’.  It’s happening right now in Portugal.  It’s happening in places like Texas where they’re called the V-roads.  The compliance levels that used to be at 90 percent are down to 79 percent.  It’s happening in those types of environments.  We have far bigger issues here.  We want to build this nation.  We want to do it constructively.  We don’t want people to go against the rule of law, but if you’re going to put in a law that just does not make sense, then it is going to suffer the test of time.