South Africans Band Together, Finding a New Enemy in Highway Tolls Kim Ludbrook/European Pressphoto Agency Protesters rallied this month against a toll system built by the South African government. JOHANNESBURG - The sleek, white structures began sprouting up over highways here about three years ago, leaving people to wonder what they were. Rush hour traffic on the N1 highway in Johannesburg, South Africa. More than 40 tollgates dot the highways around the city. A place for billboards, perhaps? Decorative pieces to spruce up the region? Or maybe they were docks to mount security cameras. Word soon trickled out through social media and other outlets that these towering metal structures, which would look at home on a space station, were tollgates. They would be used to charge the roughly one million motorists who travel the freeways of Gauteng Province every day, requiring drivers to pay for routine trips to places like work or the supermarket. Fierce outrage ensued. A diverse coalition - including the country's chief opposition party, union bosses allied with the governing party, the main Afrikaner party and church leaders - railed against the proposed program, calling it unfair and inefficient. The protests and legal challenges got the government to delay the start of the tolls for years. But the system, called E-tolls, finally went live on Dec. 3, and the passionate battle of words is growing louder. Both sides are likening their positions to this nation's long, bitter struggle for equality, accusing one another of fraud and claiming to be on the side of the ordinary citizen. Tolls, it turns out, are a very touchy subject. "It becomes almost like an economic apartheid," said Wayne Duvenage, the chairman of the Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance, explaining that low-income South Africans would not be able to afford to use the highways. It becomes roads for the rich only. Opponents of the tolls are encouraging motorists to adopt anti-apartheid struggle tactics of civil disobedience, urging them to refuse to pay their toll bills. But the government is firing back, also comparing its cause to the struggle to create an equal society. Vusi Mona, a spokesman for the government road agency, called the detractors elitists who wanted to pass the buck for highway improvements onto other South Africans. He said the opposition's primary argument - that the Gauteng highway upgrades should be paid for by increasing the national fuel tax - would shift the bill for nearly 125 miles of improvements here in one of the country's most affluent provinces onto people in poor regions. Will that be fair? Mr. Mona asked. We come from a culture of equity, redress and fairness. From an equity point of view, it just would not make sense. South Africans are used to paying tolls for long drives across provinces and the country, but what seems to irk drivers about this new system is that they now must pay to drive on roads that they need to use daily. Just a few weeks into the start of the tolls, drivers said that many of the surface roads were more clogged than before, with fellow motorists taking back routes to avoid the highways. For many residents of Johannesburg, where unemployment is 30 percent and hundreds of thousands of people live in poverty, with ramshackle homes and no electricity, the tolls are more than a matter of principle. Some are also concerned that commodity prices could rise as companies pass on to consumers the increased cost of transportation. "Why do they call it a freeway, and all of a sudden I have to pay for it?" asked Maggie Du Plooy, who owns a flower shop in a shopping complex in a Johannesburg suburb. The controversy is shaping up to serve as fodder in next year's national elections. A billboard right in front of one of the tolling gantries reads, "A vote for the D.A. is a vote against E-tolls," referring to the chief opposition party, the Democratic Alliance. Opponents painted the tolling system as an expensive project that the government, led by the African National Congress, pushed through with little public input, adding it to the list of complaints against a party already plagued by scandal and corruption. "It's just a scheme to take money," Tshireletso Ledimo, 22, who works in a telecommunications store, said of the tolls. The government is just gangsters in nice suits.