Another move has been made against Gauteng’s e-toll system, with the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) filing legal action with the High Court to request it order the South African National Roads Agency (Sanral) to abandon collecting outstanding e-toll debts.
When the e-toll system was originally implemented in December 2013, many South African motorists purposefully avoided paying their e-toll accounts to protest the system being forced on them.
Outa was instrumental in aiding these protests, and in April 2024, the e-toll system was finally shut down in Gauteng, around five years after Sanral decided to suspend e-toll debt collection.
This recent legal action from Outa was filed on 20 August 2025, case number 2025-142155, and lists Sanral and the ministers of finance, transport, and environmental affairs as respondents.
It also lists the director-general of forestry, fisheries, and the environment, as well as the commissioner of the South African Revenue Service (SARS).
Outa noted that the applicants for this action are itself and 2,028 e-toll defendants, individuals, and businesses, that it has been protecting as a part of its e-toll Defence Umbrella.
“Sanral has indicated that it intends to oppose Outa’s application. No other responses have been received so far,” Outa said.
The application requests the High Court rule that Sanral abandon its efforts to claim debts from its 2,028 defendants and remove their matters from the court system.
“Outa argues that Sanral effectively abandoned the cases after the entity’s board resolved in March 2019 to suspend the e-toll debt collection,” it said.
“In the six years since then, Sanral has taken no further steps on these cases, and Outa is now seeking legal finality on the matters.”
Should this application be successful, Sanral’s claims against the defendants will fall away.
Outa has also requested that the court force Sanral to pay its legal costs in the cases.
Uses for the e-toll gantries
While the e-toll system has been scrapped, the infrastructure built to support it remains, and many government entities have emphasised the need to use it to avoid it becoming a costly white elephant.
One of the main suggestions was for the gantries to be used for CCTV and average speed of distance monitoring.
However, Rob Handfield-Jones, the managing director of Driving.co.za, indicated this was unlikely to be doable as the delay in announcing the average speed of distance capabilities suggested insurmountable technical issues with repurposing the cameras.
This is because, while the cameras were regularised according to the Legal Metrology Act, their technical suitability for speed enforcement remains remote.
He noted an example of this, that being a high-profile case involving a politician’s son, who crashed his Porsche into a minibus taxi on an e-tolled highway in Johannesburg, resulting in a fatality among its passengers.
During the legal case, the prosecution obtained the gantry data to determine whether the politician’s son had exceeded the speed limit.
Handfield-Jones said that this data wasn’t reliable as one gantry pass wasn’t recorded at all, and the timings of others were impossible.
As a result of this, the Randburg Magistrates’ Court found that the driver wasn’t guilty of culpable homicide due to a lack of evidence that he was driving negligently during the accident.
He believes this is a clear indicator that the gantries are unlikely to be effectively repurposed for average speed over distance tracking.
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