The South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL) has given road users who have not paid outstanding e-toll bills 30 days to do so or face jail time, according to an Eyewitness News (EWN) report.
South African transport minister Dipou Peters said earlier this week over ZAR540 million (US$51 million) in e-toll bills were outstanding, with under ten per cent of outstanding bills being paid since the system was implemented and details of outstanding accounts passed to SANRAL’s Violations Processing Centre (VPC) for debt collection
Peters said the overdue amount includes ZAR32.8 million (US$3 million) “for postage and printing of invoices” and ZAR21.9 million (US$2 million) for “the cost of debt collection processes”.
EWN reports SANRAL has now threatened non-payers with jail, though the Justice Project South Africa (JPSA) responded to the threat by calling it “scaremongering” and saying it will have little effect.
“Clearly whoever made this threat must have come to the realisation that previous threats of criminal records and credit blacklisting – based on an Act that exempts itself from the National Credit Act – have had a limited effect,” said JPSA chairman, Howard Dembovsky.
“What SANRAL doesn’t seem to realise is that South Africans have been subjected to similar tyrannical threats by the previous regime and they didn’t cave in then – so why would they cave in now?
“It also appears that someone at SANRAL has decided to dispense with the troublesome formality of conducting trials and now feels that they can jump straight to sentencing people to jail time.”
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