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In two separate meetings today in Parliament, both Minister of Transport S’bu Ndebele and Transport Committee Chairperson Nozabelo Bhengu have conceded that the Gauteng E-tolling system was poorly planned and lacked a proper funding model.

In a Portfolio Committee meeting on Transport this morning, Chairperson Bhengu stated that the committee “must revisit how the decision was taken” in terms of the Gauteng E-tolling proposal. Ms Bhengu also stated that “we need policing at national level to prevent that from happening in the future.”

Minister Ndebele, in his Infrastructure Development Cluster briefing, stated that serious lessons had been learned as to how to proceed in future regarding such initiatives and there was little or no consensus on how to pay for such infrastructure developments. He conceded that the outcry over the system was due to the process being seemingly devoid of public participation or input.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) believes that this project should never have been allowed to go ahead without a proper funding model being agreed to by the Gauteng Province, the National Department of Transport and National Treasury.

In future, the DA will be pushing for a proper funding model to be put in place in terms of such infrastructure initiatives, as well as full participation and input from the public regarding their concerns with the implementation and the implications of such initiatives.

South Africans cannot be expected to bear the brunt of a proposed tolling system where proper public consultation processes were not followed, and all the funding implications were not fully considered.