The Road Accident Fund (RAF) interim board had been in office for barely a month when the fund lost its bid to extend the 180-day payment moratorium, reports TimesLIVE.

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 Gauteng High Court (Pretoria) 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 Scopa yesterday, 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.

Brown said there has to be common ground or else the system will collapse.

He said they also 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.’

Meanwhile, Brown also revealed that by December 2025, RAF had 29 employees on suspension and 33 disciplinary matters, with 12 cases finalised, according to TimesLIVE.

Offences ranged from absence without leave to gross negligence.

He said the RAF is making huge losses paying suspended employees and by 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…’

Full TimesLIVE report