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Sanral employee behind ‘terrorism’ attacks against the e-toll administrator

Yesterday, it emerged that the mastermind behind the recent alleged terrorist attacks directed against the Sanral operations centre is none other than a young employee of the roads association. But if he - News24 referred to the suspect as a ‘he’ - was so disgruntled with his employers, there are countless other ways he could’ve dealt with his concerns.


Depending on the severity of his complaint he could’ve:

• Discussed his concerns with his line manager or a member of the company’s HR department,
• Lodged a grievance, or
• Taken the company to the CCMA (although I doubt he would’ve gotten much joy out of this option).

These are all much more cost-effective options than how he chose to handle the situation.

With the two suspected anthrax scares, which happened within the space of a couple of days of each other, approximately 2 000 staffers had to be evacuated from the building while it was determined if the building was safe for the employees to carry on working. That’s a lot of man hours that were lost - probably costing Sanral a pretty penny.

In addition, there is the demotivating factor that these evacuations would have had on staff - I wouldn’t be surprised if a good portion of these 2 000 employees decided to resign in fear of their lives. There are also the medical costs because the people who opened the suspected anthrax-laced envelopes needed to be examined.

The very mention of the word ‘e-toll’ is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. People have the right to demonstrate against this system because freedom of speech is a democratically entrenched right. But don’t potentially damage people’s lives while you’re doing it!

Lia Marus is the editor of HR Pulse. She has a BA in French, Italian and Linguistics from UCT, an MA in translation from Wits and a Postgraduate Diploma in Management from the Wits Business School. She is currently studying towards her LLB through Unisa. Lia started her career off in corporate communications, where she worked as a sub-editor, researcher and marketing coordinator. She then heeded the call of the publishing world and went into the business-to-business publishing field. She worked as a sub-editor as well as a chief sub-editor. Before joining ITWeb, she managed an HR guidebook at a leading international publishing company.