The Road Accident Fund (RAF) interim board had been in office for barely a month when the fund lost its court bid to extend the 180-day payment moratorium.
Chairperson Kenneth Brown described it as the event that “broke the camel’s back”, with only R5bn in the bank while being expected to settle a R20bn debt.
In September 2025, the Pretoria high court dismissed the RAF’s urgent application to prolong the moratorium, which had shielded the fund from legal executions, finding that the matter lacked urgency and that the RAF could not rely on repeated urgent applications to evade its statutory obligations to accident victims.
Appearing before parliament’s standing committee on public works (Scopa) on Tuesday, Brown said the ruling forced the board to confront the RAF’s payment crisis, prompting efforts to rebuild stakeholder relations, including talks with plaintiff attorneys over the fund’s business model and the now-defunct 180-day moratorium.
“What broke the camel’s back was when the RAF lost the case on the moratorium, the 180-day moratorium which meant we needed to pay at the end of the day. So the first thing that we actually did was to convene a meeting with the lawyers, the plaintiff attorneys, and that whole family of attorneys there,” he said.
We are not an investment company. Our job is to pay claimants and to push the money out of the door for legitimate claims that actually just needed to be paid
— Kenneth Brown, RAF interim board chair
“We discussed this and indicated to them that, at the time, the unpaid amounts were about R20bn, which we needed to pay immediately. We also indicated to them that we had only R4.5bn or R5bn in the bank. These two figures do not talk to each other.”
Brown said there has to be common ground or else the system will collapse. He said they met with the suppliers and health practitioners, including the ambulance fraternity “because if those suppliers are not working properly, it has an adverse impact on the financial viability of the Road Accident Fund itself".
“So we started paying there, and we accelerated that. In the first few months, we paid over R4.6bn. After that, we hovered around R5bn per month.
“We are not an investment company. Our job is to pay claimants and to push the money out of the door for legitimate claims that actually just needed to be paid.”
Meanwhile, Brown also revealed that by December 2025, RAF had 29 employees on suspension and 33 disciplinary matters, with 12 cases finalised. Offences ranged from absence without leave to gross negligence.
He said the RAF is making huge losses paying suspended employees and also paying lawyers to defend them.
“What struck me most was that we had staff who had been suspended, and we were paying them R50m during their periods of suspension. We were also paying lawyers about R120m to defend those cases. Some of them we lost. So it just did not make sense. In fact, we even indicated to staff members who were on warning or suspended to come forward, and many of them did.”
Sowetan
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