Wayne Duvange will be our speaker explaining the vision and ambitions of OUTA as they move beyond the e-tolls campaign.

OUTA is a Civil Action Organisation, born in 2012 as the Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance when it challenged Government’s decision to subject an upgrade of South Africa’s busiest freeway network (in Gauteng) to an inefficient and irrational electronic tolling (e-toll) system to finance the upgrade.

While the e-Toll challenge has been stretched out over a number of years, the organisation has grown stronger and has developed into a more efficient entity with its own internal litigation capacity, researchers, investigators and other skills. The internal growth has enabled OUTA to move beyond the e-Toll issue, as the team sets out to challenge and expose inefficiencies, maladministration and corruption in other areas of state taxation policy making and state managed expenditure.

In doing so, at the start of 2016, OUTA changed it name to become the “Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse”, which enabled its retention of the OUTA acronym, whilst clearly depicting in its new name, the work and purpose of the entity.

It is no secret that since the leadership of Nelson Mandela, who led our nation out of the shackles of apartheid and nurtured the birth of an inclusive rainbow nation filled with possibilities and opportunities, the South African Government, over the past decade, has failed to maximise our nation’s potential and ability to produce sizable growth to our economy – when compared with other emerging economies.

Our current governmental leadership has lost their moral compass and lacks the ability to be transparent and inclusive of the people when introducing significant state expenditure on matters that require meaningful engagement. All indications from various monitoring reports depict a nation fraught is growing maladministration and state revenue plunder on many projects which more often than not, cost society a few hundred percent more than they ought to. This leads to a significant loss of revenues which could be well utilised in providing the necessary services to society.

OUTA’s role is to become active in challenging some of the serious issues at play and to hold those responsible for the poor governance and corruption to account for their actions. To halt the wasteful expenditure and irrational decisions which are not in the best interests of society at large.