Category: politics

You had us at “Hello”. Your wise and intellectual speech. Your dapper style. Your vision for an integrated and functional South Africa. Face it; as an English speaking pale male, you’ve got my vote. I simply don’t trust the ANC or the EFF with my country.

And to confirm it, you had one of your DA Call Centre Elves give me a shout, and I even (stupidly) admitted I’m supporting DA. So you’ve got my number, you know my support, you know my vote, you know I speak English.

But you keep sending me SMS messages, begging for my vote.
You keep automated voice diallers calling me, begging for my vote.
You send me messages, in Afrikaans, begging for my vote.

Why are you wasting all your electioneering resources campaigning to me with all this attention when you already know I’m pretty much a banked vote?

Rather go spend all that phone call and SMS money on t-shirts or food parcels or blue berets, or wherever you can beat the ANC or EFF at their own game. Somewhere it will make a difference. There’s no difference to be made by targeting me.

I’ve given you all you ever need to know about me, but you can’t even build a profile of me for a properly targeted campaign in my native tongue.

You claim to know the people, but do you, really?

Tags #DA, #MmusiMaimane

politics Rants

On e-tolls and bullshit

SANRAL stays on the Hate List with their latest display of arrogance and ignorance.

Apparently they’re revising the e-toll fees and structures, but from the scant details available, it’s all smoke and mirrors.

The new “fee cap” of R250 for light vehicles is bogus. SANRAL have been able to do statistical analysis on traffic patterns from invasively tracking our vehicles and are well aware that the majority of that class of users would spend less than R250 anyway.

The 30c/km number is nonsense, as the Government Gazette’d prices are a per-gantry price, not a per kilometre price. Which means they changed the wording, not the price.

The threat of preventing us from renewing our vehicle licenses without paying the outstanding e-toll balance is currently illegal. And it doesn’t solve the problem of eNATIS information being horribly inaccurate. Either way, the license renewal is more likely to go the way of the humble traffic fine – into the bin.

A 60% discount on outstanding balance, means people are still up to pay thousands of rands. And what about the people and companies who *did* register? They are being penalized for supporting the system. (Well, maybe that one is actually OK with me…)

30 free gantry passes a year is great if you’re over the age of 75. That’s about two visits to the city per year!
New monthly cap for accounts in arrears is just a nice way to say they’re gonna bill you up to three times your usage when you don’t pay.
This is once again a scam to rope people in. Once people sign up again, they just jack up the prices and everyone is bent over a barrel. Eskom style.
The inherent problem of cost-of-collection of e-tolls remains.

Sorry, Cyril, we see through your bullshit. You can go jump from a gantry.

Say no to e-tolls!