A Mpumalanga High Court judge has dismissed two special pleas by the Road Accident Fund after it argued a plaintiff’s summons was premature and his claim had prescribed.
What happened
Mathebula Vusi Alfred was injured in a road accident on 16 September 2021.
He lodged a claim against the Road Accident Fund on 18 July 2023, claiming only general damages.
Court records state that the following year, his attorneys issued a summons that expanded the claim to include future medical expenses and loss of earnings, heads of damages that had not appeared in the original RAF 1 form.
RAF responded by raising two special pleas.
It argued that the summons had been issued prematurely because the plaintiff had not waited the mandatory 120 days following the lodging of the additional claims.
It also contended that the claims for loss of earnings and future medical expenses had prescribed, since a separate RAF 1 covering those heads was only submitted on 3 September 2025, more than three years after the accident.
Acting Judge P D Kekana of the Mpumalanga Division dismissed both pleas and ordered the RAF to pay costs.
Premature summons argument
The RAF argued that section 24(6) of the Road Accident Fund Act prohibits a claimant from serving summons before 120 days have elapsed since lodging a claim.
According to court records, because the additional RAF 1 was only submitted in September 2025, the Fund said the May 2024 summons was premature.
Kekana rejected this, finding that the RAF’s logic would trap claimants in an impossible position.
If a plaintiff issued a summons before the 120 days had passed, the RAF could cry premature. If they waited, the prescription might kick in.
“This would result in a situation where a particular head of damages would be said to have prescribed while the underlying cause of action remains intact,” the judgment read. “Such an outcome is unsustainable.”
SCA
The court relied on the Supreme Court of Appeal decision in Nokwali v RAF 2009, where the SCA found that adding an injury to a claim did not require a new RAF 1 form and “did not introduce a new cause of action and was merely an additional item to her original cause of action.”
A 2026 North West High Court decision in Seboko v RAF reached the same conclusion, finding that a claimant “was not required to lodge an amended claim form before including the new head of damages in her summons because it merely amplified an existing cause of action.”
Kekana agreed, finding that the plaintiff “was not required to lodge an amended claim form before including the claim for loss of earnings and future medical expenses in the summons because it merely amplified an existing cause of action.”
The prescription argument
The RAF’s second argument was that the loss-of-earnings and medical-expenses claims had prescribed under the Prescription Act, since they were only formally lodged more than three years after the accident.
The court dismissed this, too. Kekana confirmed the established principle that prescription runs against a debt as a whole, not against individual heads of damages.
All damages flowing from the same accident constitute one debt.
Returning to Nokwali, she noted that the SCA had held that “the original cause of action remains intact and the discovery of a new injury does not alter the fundamental basis of the claim.”
On that basis, she found that the additional claims “merely amplif[ied] and complete[d] the relief already claimed by the plaintiff in his initial claim against the defendant” and did not create a new debt.
Both special pleas were dismissed.
RAF was ordered to pay the plaintiff’s legal costs, including the costs of the two-day hearing in March 2026.
