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Opinionista

The time for serious questions and action at Sanral is overdue

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Wayne Duvenage is a businessman and entrepreneur turned civil activist. Following former positions as CEO of AVIS and President of SA Vehicle Renting and Leasing Association, Duvenage has headed the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse since its inception in 2012.

An open letter urging the board of the South African National Roads Agency (Sanral) to sincerely unpack the reasons why the courts and the people have ruled against it, and then to ask what can be done to rectify this dire situation as soon as possible.

Dear Sanral board members

Presumably at your next board meeting, one major agenda item will feature high on the list of priorities: discussion on the latest judgment against Sanral, which set aside the decision to toll the Western Cape’s urban freeway network.

Some deep introspection is needed to reflect on how and why your organisation finds itself on the losing side of a succession of court judgments and, more worryingly, unable to get beyond adversarial hostility when you win, to push for deeper learning.

The Sanral board members will do well to reflect on the string of judgments and executive decisions against their plans over the past decade. In December 2004, Sanral found itself on the losing side when the environment minister set aside the decision of his department’s director-general to authorise the unsolicited bid by the N2 Wild Coast Consortium Toll Road. The minister found that the environmental impact assessment consultant had a conflict of interests because he was also a director of one of the members of the N2 Wild Coast Consortium. It was so obviously a fatal flaw, but the board ought to have been further alarmed when Sanral CEO Nazir Alli wrote in his 2005 annual report “we believe that the minister was wrong in law to have done so”. A more appropriate response would have been for Alli to engage with the objectors in the spirit and letter of Section 195 of the Constitution to negotiate in a non-adversarial manner.

Then in June 2006 Judge Phineas Mojapelo handed down a landmark judgment that every member of the Sanral board should be obliged to read as part of their induction process. It spells out in detail, the meaning and importance of proper public consultation. Failure to do so introduces a serious risk factor to the organisation, which should be a matter of concern for the board of directors.

Then again, in February 2011 Judge Bert Bam’s ruled on the matter between HMKL 3 Investments (Pty) Ltd and Sanral, which provided further evidence that Sanral had not learned the prior lessons on offer from the judiciary. And once again, this week’s judgment of Judges Ashley Binns-Ward and Nolwazi Boqwana in the City of Cape Town vs Sanral case, is a devastating indictment of Sanral’s governance systems.

The strong common thread that weaves its way through these lost cases stands out clearly; the serious lack of public engagement, a constitutional requirement, the denial of which has carried serious and costly consequences for Sanral. For it has largely been the ill winds of ignoring the need to meaningfully engage with the people that has now left Sanral reaping a whirlwind of public anger at its plans to toll the urban freeways Gauteng and the Western Cape.

What’s more, is that this fiasco is not yet over. Next week, Sanral is back to court again trying to argue that the Amadiba community on the Wild Coast have never mandated their attorney to have the resubmitted N2 Wild Coast toll road authorisation set aside. Here, once again, your organisation is accused of not only ignoring the will of the people and the advice of civil society leader Bishop Geoff Davies, but also of resorting to fraudulent affidavits and forged signatures.

Now to this picture, you might want to add a grossly increased marketing budget, which catapulted from R8-million per annum a few years ago, to R80-odd-million by 2014, largely aimed at peddling the shunned e-toll scheme. To top it all, much of this money was wasted on misleading adverts which the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has ordered Sanral to desist from airing, following public complaints on no less than four separate occasions over the past two years, the most recent being another instruction from the ASA handed down to Sanral just this week.

I also ask with all sincerity, Roshan Morar, as the chairman of the Sanral board, that you place on your agenda just when and how you propose to share in detail with the people of South Africa, the progress being made on Sanral’s stated intentions to bring to book, the collusive construction companies on the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP). How much money does Sanral envisage recouping from those who have ripped off society by several billions of rands in the GFIP? When will the charges be laid?

One might be tempted to forgive the Sanral board for not seeing the picture being painted here, as you are after all located deep in the Sanral forest. But then forgiveness should not be granted, as the Sanral board members have been selected to be the conscience of this entity, entrusted with exercising your skills and ability to step outside the woods, and take a hard look at the picture being painted from the people’s perspective. And if you do so with the above backdrop now clearly in place, you may begin to see the oil of this painting is slapped thick and glistening with arrogance and a lack of sensitivity for the people’s opinions and needs.

Sanral espouses that it is a “learning organisation”. Seriously? Following years and years of repeated costly errors that shun your very customers (the public) and show contempt for the judgments of judge after judge?

Never mind the damage this arrogance does to morale of thousands of good employees and talented engineers within Sanral, who are embarrassingly and unwittingly tasked with defending these blows to the unhealthy, self-deceiving organisational culture that has developed within Sanral.

Yes these are tough questions that require bold actions, but they are real and serious questions which I hope will top the agenda of your next board meeting. I beg of you that you do so knowing that those who challenge Sanral are not the enemy. We want nothing more than to see Sanral thrive as a successful national road-building entity. It pains us to hear the ‘threatening’ reaction by Sanral representatives which suggests the withholding of infrastructure development, just because the Western Cape court ruling was not in Sanral’s favour. We would rather you sincerely unpack the reasons why the courts and the people have ruled against you, and ask instead what can be done to rectify this dire situation as soon as possible, so that together we can get on track to address the infrastructural needs of our country, with the best outcomes and at the lowest possible cost to society.

Yours sincerely

Wayne Duvenage

Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance chairman

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