Sakeliga objects to SANRAL's draft roadside facilities policy

Sakeliga has submitted its formal objections to the South African National Roads Agency (SANRAL)'s Draft Policy for Rest and Service Facilities along National Roads, which threatens to unlawfully expand the agency's legal powers and harmfully and unlawfully impose BEE obligations on private businesses.

The Draft Policy would give SANRAL sweeping power to dictate who may operate a business alongside a national road, what transformation credentials they must hold, how their business must be structured, and what levies they must pay – even when the business operates on privately owned land and has no contractual relationship with SANRAL.

Their only "sin" is that they are situated in the vicinity of a road that SANRAL manages.

No legal authority

The Draft Policy claims authority from sections 44 and 48 of the SANRAL Act, which deal with controlling access to and from national roads. These narrow provisions are intended to manage road safety and traffic flow.

The Draft Policy significantly overreaches the intent of these provisions, using them as the legal foundation for a sweeping commercial and socio-economic regulatory regime.

The road agency's authority, as defined by the SANRAL Act, is restricted to the planning, financing, construction, operation, management, and maintenance of national roads. SANRAL is not an economic regulator, a licensing authority for private businesses, or empowered to impose transformation requirements on private landowners. The SANRAL Act grants no authority to regulate who may own, operate, or invest in a business on private land adjacent to a national road.

Thus, not only is SANRAL’s draft policy unacceptable by virtue of its contents, but also because SANRAL has not been granted any such authority under South African legislation.

Unlawful imposition of BEE on private operators

The Draft Policy requires developers and owners of roadside facilities such as petrol stations, restaurants, truck stops, and convenience stores to comply fully with SANRAL's Transformation Policy, which is an internal procurement instrument.

It determines how SANRAL spends its budget on contractors, suppliers, and consultants for road construction and maintenance. The Draft Policy now requires private businesses on private land to comply with the same framework, even though they are not contracting with SANRAL, are not spending public money, and are not supplying any product or service to SANRAL.

The effect is that developers and owners of these facilities would be required to satisfy SANRAL's B-BBEE compliance requirements simply as a condition of accessing the national road network.

This is another example of 3rd Wave BEE.

SANRAL intends to create a parallel BEE compliance regime for private businesses by attaching transformation conditions to road-access approvals. It is abusing its control over public road infrastructure as a lever to impose racial obligations on private operators, by subverting a statutory regulatory function as an instrument of socio-economic engineering, imposing obligations on private businesses that have no basis in law.

Adverse consequences for businesses and consumers

Beyond its legal defects, the policy threatens concrete harm to businesses and the economy. The Draft Policy would:

• Increase barriers to entry through centralised approvals, spacing rules, and site bundling.

• Reduce competition by protecting incumbents and limiting market-driven entry.

• Raise costs for businesses and consumers alike, with turnover-based levies of up to 10%.

• Deter investment through regulatory uncertainty, short lease periods, and the risks associated with discretionary access approvals.

Furthermore, it imposes excessive administrative and compliance burdens on private operators while distorting commercial incentives through prescriptive ownership and structural requirements.

Next steps

Private businesses operating on private land should not be required to surrender ownership, restructure their operations, or demonstrate transformation credentials to a roads agency. Moreover, in this case, the entity making these unacceptable demands lacks the legislative authority to do so.

Sakeliga will challenge this policy, should it be promulgated in its current form or any form with similar defects.