While the Road Accident Fund (RAF) this week in presenting its annual financial report said the fund is not out of the woods yet, but it's heading in the right direction, the Association for the Protection of Road Accident Victims (APRAV) expressed its concerns about the fund’s operations, including the thousands of unregistered claims.
The chairperson of APRAV, Pieter de Bruyn, addressed a letter to various stakeholders in response to the RAF’s attack on concerns raised by DA MP Chris Hunsinger, in which he said there is an urgent need to fix the broken fund.
The DA’s Chris Hunsinger wrote a letter to the minister last week in which he drew her attention to the fact that the RAF seems to have halted payments for nearly four months.
Hunsinger said this state of affairs seems to point to the fund’s imminent implosion without prompt intervention from either the Transport Minister or the Portfolio Committee on Transport.
These allegations were refuted by the fund’s CEO, Collins Letsoalo, who, among others, reported a reduced deficit of R1.8 billion for 2023/24, compared to R8.4bn the previous year when he and the board presented their financial report this week.
APRAV meanwhile in its letter said that change is necessary and to this end has already submitted comments on the proposed RAF Amendment Bill.
The organisation has written to the newly appointed Minister of Transport, Barbara Creecy, to offer its knowledge and research on various matters which it said will not only address the RAF’s short-, medium- and long-term sustainability and service delivery requirements, but also contribute to the reduction of the enormous backlog of claims currently being litigated in the various jurisdictions countrywide.
“There are thousands of unregistered claims that are lodged with the RAF but returned at considerable (wasted) costs without allocating a registration or even a link number,” de Bruyn said.
He added that this course of action not only denies many “direct” claimants their right to claim from the RAF but also results in an enormous unrecorded liability.
De Bruyn said the travesty lies in the fact that these claims are returned due to non-compliance of an illegal RAF board notice (which was overturned by the court), effectively denying themselves any remedy to object to these claims in terms of the law.
“The RAF is reported to receive 100 000 personal injury claims per year of which 70% are sent back or denied due to non-compliance with an illegal RAF board notice. At an average value of R 163 000.00 per claim the RAF’s annual report is R12 billion short.”
De Bruyn explained that in reality what is recorded in the annual report (for instance total claims lodged, claims finalised and any financial statements concerning settlements and liability) can never be relied upon. This, he said, is as only illegal board notice registered claims are being recorded, while not having regard to the thousands of other claims that are in the system but fail to be recorded due to the RAF’s illegal application of their board notice.
“This and other helter-skelter actions undertaken by the RAF have unintended consequences that will take years to unravel and will come at an enormous cost to the taxpayer.”
While Letsoalo blamed lawyers for the delay in finalising claims and said they wanted to drag out litigation for as long as possible as it suited their pockets, lawyers responded that it was actually the opposite.This, because many carry the expenses if they handle claims on a contingency basis, pending the finalisation of a claim.
They said they would gladly settle claims rather than turn to litigation.
De Bruyn meanwhile said they are yet to see the statistics on default judgment matters and the additional costs caused as a result of the fund not having any viable action plan to settle matters capable of settlement that are older than 120 days and have been allocated trial dates.
In a recent internal communication, the executive management mentioned one of their “critical projects” is to attend to its claims backlog campaign which targets claims older than three years.
De Bruyn said yet the RAF is still making no attempt to attend to these matters or simply even informing stakeholders on how they intend to action this initiative or how they intend to reduce the congested court trial rolls.
Letsoalo this week denied that the RAF is the cause of these congested rolls and said that in 99% of the cases, they are the defenders and not the party who initiated the litigation.
But De Bruyn said they as APRAV submit, based upon recent judgements and experiences shared by actual victims of the RAF, experience a picture totally different from that painted by the fund.
Pretoria News