Upward trend in e-toll collections
Pretoria, 5 August 2015. Angrily tampering with figures to make a point is not contributing to a rational approach on the question of e-tolls. But this is what Wayne Duvenage of OUTA has done when the Minister of Transport’s parliamentary response indicated that there is an upward trend in e-toll income.
“It is general knowledge that when the Gauteng premier announced the Advisory Panel to relook the project, it caused uncertainty with an immediate and steep drop in income from a high of R120 million in June 2014 to R45 million in January this year,” says SANRAL’s Chief Financial Officer, Inge Mulder.
With the announcement on the 20th May 2015 that the user-pay principle will stay but the tariffs will be reduced, e-toll cash receipts began recovering and the trend is positive: from R61 million in April this year to R76 million in May, R78 million in June and R82 million in July – clearly an upward trend.
Any businessman knows that it is practice to adjust forecasts monthly to take new developments into account - as is done by the Reserve Bank and many other prudent businesses.
“The revised forecasts notwithstanding, it is clear that month-on-month there is an upward trend in payment since the Deputy President’s announcement in May. This is all we are saying – the facts don’t lie,” says Mulder.