After the Democratic Alliance (DA) last week put up billboards in protest against e-tolls, sporting the words "E-tolls: Proudly brought to you by the ANC", South African social media users have quickly gotten in on the act, causing the #ProudlyBroughtByANC hashtag to trend on Twitter for the past two days.
National ANC spokesperson, Jackson Mthembu, retaliated to the billboards on the social media platform by posting tweets such as "Building and giving for free over 3million RDP houses to deserving South Africans #ProudlyBroughtByANC", "A credible and world acclaimed criminal justice system #ProudlyBroughtByANC" and "A single education system for all #ProudlyBroughtByANC".
However, Twitter users have adopted the banner in an effort to lash out at the ruling party. Some of the Tweets under the #ProudlyBroughtByANC hashtag include "Potholes, name changes, gravy train, rassism [sic], cadre deployment, white genocide", "A decline in almost all global rankings", "Undelivered textbooks and poor education results" and "Not willing to disclose what the fuel levy expenditure is".
DA leader, Helen Zille; the party's shadow minister of communications, Marian Shinn; and a few of the provincial DA accounts joined in on the trend, retweeting several of the tweets.
A number of anti-e-toll groups have also popped up on Facebook, such as the "1 million motorists refuse to pay eTolls"-group which had 44 366 likes at the time of publication, "Against E-Toll" with 12 779 likes and "Bikers against e-tolls SA" with 5935 members.
One Web site even offers downloadable PDF files showing a visual resistance to e-tolls and encourages visitors to print it out and display it in their car windows. An informal online poll done by ITWeb, shows that 47% of readers will actively take part in mass action to bring down the e-toll system, while 39% vow to boycott the system.
The Department of Transport is, however, sticking to its guns, and says Gauteng motorists can expect the commencement of e-tolls on the province's highways sometime during the holiday season.
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