Ben Martins, South Africa’s minister of transport, yesterday revealed the envisaged national transport “master plan,” which includes the tolling of roads throughout the country.
During the debate in the National Assembly on the transport budget vote, Martins argued it is impossible for the fiscus to attribute funds to the road infrastructure backlog.
“The department is in the process of finalising the national transport master plan (NATMAP) before it is submitted to Cabinet,” the Independent Online (IOL) quoted Martins as saying.
Martins added: “The alignment between the NATMAP and the National Development Plan, which sets out critical national policy goals to be achieved by 2030, includes implementing the user pay principle in a manner that does not have a crushing effect on the working class and the poor.”
Dismissing this, Ian Ollis, shadow minister of transport and Democratic Alliance (DA) member of parliament (MP) said: “The SANRAL (South African Roads Agency Limited) misleads us by stating that the road maintenance backlog is about ZAR149 million (US$15.171 million), which means that we have many new toll roads across the country.”
According to Ollis SANRAL’s arguments do not make sense.
“If you look at the annual budget documents supplied by Treasury and the annual audits supplied by the auditor-general, you can clearly see that between 2003 and 2008, an average of more than ZAR21 billion (US$2.138 billion) was brought in from the fuel levy (per year), while only an average of ZAR7.4 billion (US$753.4 million) was spent on roads,” said Ollis.
Furthermore, Ollis asked the question of where the rest of the money was spent.
“If you approximate ZAR14 billion (US$1.425 billion) per annum from 1994, until around 2010, that gives us an approximate ZAR238 billion (US$24.233 billion) of fuel levy money misused by this government… government spent the money and now pretends that we have to pay tolls to afford our roads,” concluded Ollis.
