The Road Accident Fund (RAF) new draft bill proposes to exclude foreign nationals from claiming compensation from the fund.
The fund says it has paid out over R3.3 billion in claims to more than 8 000 foreign nationals over the past two years.
The Road Accident Fund says it wants to clamp down on those who have turned the fund into a cash machine. It says as things currently stand, foreign nationals have been able to claim from the fund whether documented or undocumented.
The fund says foreigners will be required to take up travel insurance or other means to cater for themselves when entering South Africa, which is standard practice in other countries.
Head of Corporate Communications, McIntosh Polela says, “We have paid upwards of R3.3 billion to foreign nationals just from 2021 April to March 2023, and that’s for a number of 8 600 odd foreign nationals but again I need to emphasise, we don’t have indicators whether these were people that were here illegally or the people that were documented. So what we’re proposing now is that foreign nationals are not going to be catered for. If you come through our borders, however you come through our borders, you need to have insurance.”
Scrutiny
The RAF has come under fire from lawyers, lobby groups and medical aids over the amendments in the newly proposed bill.
They have argued that the amendment to the bill infringes on the rights of accident victims across the country.
CEO of the African Diaspora Global Network, Dr Vusimuzi Sibanda, says foreign nationals contribute to the fund through fuel taxes like any other road user in the country.
He says foreign nationals are entitled to all the benefits provisioned for them in the Labour Relations Act.
“Fuel is so expensive mainly because of the Road Accident Fund and the contribution thereto. So, that becomes an unfair exclusion because all these people use that same fuel. It’s based on a very wrong concept that assumes that if someone is a foreign national, they don’t pay taxes. What people do not understand is that the different regimes of taxation that fund the various activities like RAF are funded by taxation that comes mainly from fuel. So, I think it’s something that stands to be challenged.”
National Spokesperson for the SA E-hailing sector, Vhatuka Mbelwangwa, says migrant labourers are generally unprotected and exploited by major e-hailing companies operating in the country.
“A delivery guy gets hit by a vehicle now and the platform realises that this delivery is no longer en-route, and they can establish that the bike has been hit, they simply re-issue the order and somebody else delivers it and that’s it, there’s no support or intervention. It becomes the state’s problem because they’re moved to state hospitals or state mortuaries and the state can’t even go back to those platforms to say who is this individual because they themselves don’t have proper identification of these individuals that they’re exploiting.”
The proposed RAF Amendment Bill includes a complete restructuring of the RAF, moving away from compensation to a social benefits structure.
It also proposes replacing lump sum payouts with a fixed regular income for accident victims.
