South African Road Federation (SARF) president Saied Solomons says Finance Minister Tito Mboweni overlooked South Africa’s 750 000 km road network when he announced his 2019 Budget last month.

Solomons adds that the road network, which is the tenth-longest in the world and is worth about R2-trillion, is one of the pillars of the economy.

“South Africa does not have a comprehensive road funding policy. I hope that the new draft policy developed as far back as 2017 will fill this gap. Policy has to come before a Budget, as the Minister himself emphasised.

“Right now, the funding of our roads remains inherently flawed in the absence of a policy to enable a road funding mechanism and administration acceptable to all stakeholders,” Solomons notes.

He adds that the fuel levy increase that Mboweni announced – 29c per litre for petrol and 30c per litre for diesel – is not ideal to finance the country’s roads.

Solomons explains that this levy taxes the poor at the same tax rate as the rich. Those who can afford newer, more fuel-efficient cars are paying less to travel the same distance as those who are less well off and drive older vehicles.

“Government is also losing revenue, owing to the continuous improvement in vehicle fuel efficiency. Many people are paying more road use tax through the fuel levy than what their fair share of road use demands. With more electric vehicles on the horizon, the fuel levy will not be sustainable.

“The fuel levy also does not consider road damage caused by the mass of a vehicle and, critically, it cannot be used as a tool to manage congestion during peak periods.”

Solomons states that Mboweni highlighted the rapid rate of urbanisation in South Africa, but did not focus on roads as central to dealing with the issue.

He adds that two-thirds of the country’s population live in urban areas and that Gauteng’s population is soaring beyond 14-million people. The number of vehicles that people own in the country has doubled since 1994, with about 40% of these vehicle owners living in Gauteng.

“With this enormous demand on our roads, the available funding for maintenance and expansion of the road network is not enough and road users are paying more and more in time, owing to congestion. In Johannesburg and Pretoria, for example, road users are currently spending roughly 37 minutes a day in traffic, which amounts to 141 hours a year. “They are also paying heavily in vehicle operating costs where roads are in poor condition.”

He points out that South Africa urgently needs a tariff-setting mechanism that deals with congestion and bad driver behaviour, for which the fuel levy is not suitable.

Solomons adds that the Road Accident Fund levy remains highly problematic. In 2017, the road accident cost, according to the Road Traffic Management Corporation, was about R142-billion and this figure has since escalated further.

“But a significant portion of this money goes to the legal profession without benefiting the road user. This levy also does not consider who caused the accident. Again, this means that reckless driving has little consequence for people who drive outside of the law.”

SARF and the Southern African Bitumen Association in 2017 initiated a road funding study with Stellenbosch University; the study reveals that accidents cost the country trillions of rands each year, placing an unnecessary drain on the fiscus and preventing other road priorities from being addressed, Solomons highlights.

He does, however, welcome the R3.5-billion that the Minister allocated to the South African National Roads Agency to improve nontoll roads over the next three years, but he says this is simply part of the agency’s mandate – to finance, improve, manage and maintain the national road network for people and the economy.

“Worryingly, this money does not address the serious backlogs in road maintenance [of] our roads, which the SARF calculates requires an additional R23.3-billion a year to address.

I salute Mboweni for promoting the user-pays principle and encouraging South Africans to pay for services and to pay their taxes. This, I hope, has set the scene to build understanding around a user-pay principle that will counter the high levels of civil disobedience we see in the country.”

Solomons says South Africa needs a new approach to road funding, based on the mass of the vehicle and the distance travelled.