Are foreigners ‘bleeding’ South Africa’s Road Accident Fund ‘dry’? Numbers don’t back the claim
- Collins Letsoalo, then RAF chief executive, made the claim initially and it was repeated by fund spokesperson McIntosh Polela before spreading widely, but the fund itself told Africa Check it had “no information” about the origin of the figure.
- The amount paid to non-South African citizens was closer to R8.6 billion, less than half of that claimed by Letsoalo, Polela and others, and just over 1% of the total amount paid to all claimants over five years.
- While the claim may have contributed to anti-migrant sentiment, experts told us that the RAF’s troubles, currently under investigation, should be traced to internal maladministration and related contentious accounting changes.
South Africa’s Road Accident Fund (RAF) is a public body that compensates people injured in vehicle crashes (or, for fatal crashes, the victims’ families) for financial losses.
The agency is funded largely by a levy added to the fuel price. The national treasury decides the levy amount, which in recent years has been set at R2.18. This brings in around R50 billion a year in revenue.
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In a May 2024 news article, then-chief executive Collins Letsoalo reportedly said the fund paid out R18 billion in claims to non-South African citizens in the previous five years.
Letsoalo also said that the RAF “would have paid at least R3.6 billion to foreign nationals annually for the past five years”.
“Foreigners can just claim and that is the problem. Most of them are [undocumented],” Letsoalo was quoted as saying.
His claim comes at a time when anti-immigrant groups, sometimes with the support of political actors, have blamed migrants for contributing to a healthcare system crisis and soaring unemployment. Experts have repeatedly flagged this move as scapegoating for systemic failures and governance issues.
And, as it turns out, Letsoalo had his figures wrong.
Letsoalo’s claim of R18 billion was repeated in May 2024 by RAF spokesperson McIntosh Polela, who told Metro FM radio during an interview: “Now we’re talking about R18.6 billion … now, we get R45 billion a year. If we give such a big chunk to foreign nationals, I’m afraid it’s going to collapse the Road Accident Fund.”
Speaking about the impact of foreign claimants on the RAF, Polela said: “We are being bled dry by people who shouldn’t be, in the first place … claiming from us. An illegal immigrant … should not be enjoying the benefits of the citizens of this country and those who are here legally.”
The RAF has faced intense criticism in recent years over its governance and financial management. In 2025, investigations into alleged mismanagement and corruption were ongoing. Letsoalo was suspended, and the fund’s board dissolved.
But this didn’t stop the R18 billion figure from being repeated in news articles and in posts from popular social media accounts. It formed part of a parliamentary question posed to the transport minister in July 2025, and then appeared in a series of social media posts. Many went even further and claimed that the R18 billion in payouts reflected 2024 alone.
The money paid out in claims to non-South African citizens is provided in some but not all of the RAF annual reports. We contacted the fund to request a full breakdown since the 2019/20 financial year, which they provided.
The transport ministry had not provided input on the numbers at the time of publication, but it did issue a parliamentary reply in December 2025 in which it gave a full breakdown of payouts to non-South African citizens from 2020/21.
(Note: Per this reply: “The Road Accident claims database does not specify the nationality of individual claimants, but distinguishes between those who are South African citizens and those who are not.”)
Some amounts reflected across these three sources – RAF annual reports, RAF breakdown and transport ministry breakdown – varied slightly, but there were no major discrepancies. The RAF told Africa Check that slight variations in figures across their reporting often result from recoveries or reversals of claims, unallocated payments, or differing calculation methods.
Using the RAF breakdown, which includes all years in the five-year period cited by Letsoalo (2019/20 to 2023/24), the total amount is R8.6 billion. If the five-year period from 2020/21 to 2024/25 is used, the total comes to around R7.3 billion.
Whichever calculation is used, the total amount of money paid out by the RAF to non-South African citizens comes to roughly half what Letsoalo claimed.
When we asked the RAF about the numbers, their communications department said that they “have no information regarding the origin of the R18 billion figure”.
When asked why Polela, their head of corporate communications, had repeated the inaccurate number in a radio interview, the team said he “misspoke”. To our knowledge, no public correction has ever been issued.
Kirstie Haslam is a personal injury attorney who has been involved with analysing and contributing to the parliamentary processes around proposed amendments to RAF policies. She told Africa Check the R18 billion figure was “wholly inaccurate”, and highlighted that the most recent figures also show a decline from previous years.
In the most recent annual reports, the total claims expenditure was reported as over R40 billion annually, meaning the money paid out to foreign claimants would have made up a small fraction of the total spending on claims.
Songezo Zibi is chairperson of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa), which in 2025 began an inquiry into the accounting practices and other issues at the RAF.
In October, he posted a video to X where he addressed false information about foreign claimants.
He said that the money paid out to non-South African citizens was a small fraction of the total amount paid out to all claimants – a little over 1% in 2024/25. Speaking about the problem of unprocessed claims, Zibi said: “It can’t be foreigners, because the volume is just too small. There are other problems in the RAF.”
While non-South African citizen claim payments were presented as a substantial burden by Polela and Letsoalo in 2024, the ongoing inquiry and the numbers provided by the transport ministry and the RAF do not bear this out.
Allegations emerging from the ongoing Scopa inquiry include systemic governance failures, financial mismanagement and maladministration, and a substantial claims backlog, among a string of other issues.
Central to the inquiry is the RAF’s decision to change its accounting practices. The entity has been in financial trouble for many years, with money owed much higher than the money it received.
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Before the change, the RAF’s own 2019/20 annual report put its claims liability (what it owed in claims) at around R330 billion. After management switched to a different unapproved accounting framework, the claims liability shown in financial statements dropped to under R30 billion. This is, on paper, around a 90% reduction.
A Daily Maverick analysis explains that: “By switching accounting standards and slowing down claims processing, management could keep claims ‘in transit’ – existing in a convenient limbo where they don’t count as liabilities on the books.”
The auditor-general found this change in accounting standards to be misleading, and has been in court battles with the RAF over the issue.
We asked Haslam about the contribution of non-South African citizen claims. She said that based on the numbers provided by the transport ministry, the issue of non-South African citizen claimants “is not a major driver when it comes to RAF payouts and performance”, compared with other problems.
Haslam said that, as the SCOPA inquiry has shown: “The far bigger issue … has been rampant maladministration.”
The widely shared statement that the RAF paid R18 billion to foreign claimants in five years is not supported by the fund’s own data or by the transport ministry’s figures. All data points to payouts amounting to half of that, making up a small fraction of total spending on claims.
The picture emerging from parliament’s ongoing inquiry is that governance failures, a large claims backlog and contentious accounting changes, not foreign claimants, lie at the heart of the RAF’s problems.
