The Road Accident Fund recently held what they called a public consultation on the Road Accident Benefit Scheme.  The golden rule of legislation is that anything that is called a Benefit Scheme generally has no benefits at all, or much less benefits than you had in the first place and that is certainly the case here.  Public consultation equally turned out to be a laugh.  

The Road Accident Fund advertised in the Sunday media on 15 June 2014 that members of the public had until 17 June to register for the meeting.  16 June was of course a public holiday which made it extremely hard for anybody to actually register by that deadline.  It would be fine, if it was not for the fact that members of the media could still happily register until 18 June, the day before the meeting.  Members of the media were also offered one-on-one interviews with the CEO of the Road Accident Fund, Dr Eugene Watson.  It was disappointing to see that the Road Accident Fund was more interested in telling the media about the benefits of the new system than they were with meeting with the members of the public and that the media not only had an extra day to reply to the invitation, but that they were given two e-mail addresses to reply to as well as two cell phone numbers that you could phone, whereas members of the public were only given one office number, which was not answered half of the time, and one e-mail address to write to.  

I was denied access to this meeting, as were many other attorneys and individuals that I became aware of and one hopes that at a later stage proper effort will be made to actually consult with members of the public and the legal profession so that valuable viewpoints can be heard by the Road Accident Fund.  The meeting that took place in Pretoria on 19 June was certainly not a public consultation and by all accounts, of those who attended the meeting, it was simply a publicity stunt with no real interaction whereby the Road Accident Fund and the Department of Transport tried to explain how fantastic the new system will be, which gives people very few benefits, and that by introducing a no fault system, there will be no need for lawyers in the system anymore.  That also of course means that benefits are being reduced to a large extent because the drunk who drives through a red robot and smashes into somebody’s car, paralysing them, will now qualify for the same compensation as his victims, because it will not matter in the future anymore who was to blame for the accident.  Before I get questions on my blog, which often turn up 6 months  or a year later – and it is always better to e-mail us then – laws are not retrospective, so if you have caused an accident in the past, it will not allow you to be able to claim in future should the law change.