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Do the right thing, Sanral

HELLUVA trip home yesterday. I left Pretoria after five thirty, so I thought the worst would be over.

Nyet. Between John Vorster Drive (and gosh, old Balthazar has some staying power, doesn’t he, no name changes for him) and the stretch where Pretoria West townhouse construction thins to a few blotches on the landscape, the N14 was down to a standstill at times.

So I was in no mood to hear that the South African National Roads Agency (Sanral) had said it needs R120bn to “alleviate traffic congestion”, especially since it was traffic coming out of two recently ‘alleviated’ sections of freeway that had caused the snarl-up.

And I was in no mood to hear Professor Havenga of Stellenbosch University tell Bruce Whitfield on 702 Talk Radio that he’d be quite comfortable putting that kind of money into the hands of Sanral, who – according to him – do a pretty decent job, really.

“Well,” I muttered, “You’re a freight man. Maybe you freight guys have that kind of relationship with Sanral. I don’t. My relationship with Sanral is at the point where it’s going to take YEARS of intensive therapy before I stay on the phone for ten minutes to listen to what he says, let alone entrust Sanral with anything precious of mine again. In fact, I’m not even sure that therapy will hack it – words like ‘irretrievable breakdown’ spring to mind.”

To be sure, this is how I feel about huge chunks of government right now. Their relationship skills stink.

They are rather like that kind of significant other – the one who borrows your brand new car without telling you, because he doesn’t have enough petrol in his car, and he spills sticky soda all over the upholstery while on the way to fetch your kids, who he forgets about because he just had to make a little detour to see whether the android he’d ordered had come in, which it hadn’t but he bumped into Andile while he was in Rosebank who told him about this great place that does car accessories and that, and so it all worked out fine, doll, because look! you found a new friend in the mommy who saved the kids when they didn’t know what to do because no one came to fetch them and the cover he found for the car seat is in purple, which is, like, your favourite colour, so everything’s awesome, right?

And you want to belch out all the rage and panic and fear and anger you’ve felt in the last two hours; you want to talk about trust issues and honesty and maturity; and instead, sandbagged by the total wrongness of his last remark, the sheer, blinding evidence of how little he knows you, you say coldly: “I hate purple.”

And he replies indignantly: “No babe! Since when? Come ooooon!”

And that’s what you end up fighting about for an hour and twenty minutes: the colour purple… *

Before Sanral approaches the fiscus – which is OUR money, please let us all remember, paid in by every PAYE payer, every taxpaying company and every single person, up and down the land, who pays VAT on any item they buy – to say they need more money, we have to resolve the issues around e-tolls.

Really. Because we just can’t trust you. You have lost our confidence thoroughly, and for real reasons. Not just because we don’t like that shade of orange.

And you keep on doing it.

When Gauteng premier David Makhuru established a panel to look into e-tolls, it was the first sign of sensible behaviour from any government body relative to e-tolls. Yes! Let’s talk!

But national government almost immediately demolished much of the goodwill generated: “It’s important that the panel doesn’t create the impression that we’re going to do away with the system. The system will be government’s policy to accelerate infrastructure development.” Transport Minister Dipuo Peters.

And again, more recently: “That panel’s report is not my report. It’s not the national department of transport’s report because we did not constitute a panel to review any policy. The user-pay principle is a policy of South Africa.” (Both quotes taken from reports on EWN.)

Hey-hey-hey-hey. You guys just don’t get it. You have taken on the mantle of authoritarian daddy – either because that was what we were used to under apartheid, or because that was the way they did it in Bulgaria – but that kind of family dynamic just doesn’t work any more.

In this e-toll debacle – where early on you went through a meaningless, box-ticking ‘consultative’ process (and it would have been so easy to make it really meaningful!) and since then have treated us like unreasonable children – the Gauteng public have put you on notice that they will not accept being talked down to and told what they must just accept.

You are getting on your high horse about the wrong things. It is not just e-tolling but the relationship between government and citizen which is at stake here.

In fact, getting on your high horse IS the wrong thing. Take a deep breath, act like a grown-up and say, “Can we start again? These are our practical issues, our needs, our goals. How do you think we can achieve them?” Broad consultation can be long-winded, but its results can be amazing, and it’s not hard – ask people from the pre-1994 UDF, Black Sash and similar organisations. We did it. (We just knitted through the long-winded bits!)

For all our sakes, pay attention to the right thing – the relationship – before all respect and confidence is gone. I warn you, we’re almost there already. And that really would be irretrievable.

 - Fin24

*Please note: there are women who behave like this too. I am simply using the gender that comes naturally to me as a woman.

Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.

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