Maravi

(HERALD) Invest toll fees in road repairs

Invest toll fees in road repairs

THE road tolls are starting to produce some serious money for highway maintenance with US$3,1 million taken since they started being collected in August this year.

Around US$1 million a month can do a lot of good. Resentment from road users has so far been minimal, so the idea that road users pay for the roads has been accepted and the modest fees are considered reasonable.

The idea that those who use national services the most, and the roads are definitely that, should pay the bulk of the costs of that service, rather than the general taxpayer, has now been accepted.

So with the income starting to flow in, what is now needed is some spending.

Drivers will pay tolls without too many complaints so long as they are driving on decent roads. Or at the very least, so long as they see gangs starting to repair roads.

Dualisation and widening of roads can wait a little longer; what must be done immediately is repairing what is there, then sorting out some of the more dangerous corners and sections.

Many of these bad patches are well known; there are where so many accidents occur.

Even with dualisation, the old road will be still be one of the carriageways and will not be much use if it has been allowed to break up because the new carriageway has absorbed all the cash.

In the evidence given to Parliament’s Transport and Communication Portfolio Committee this week, Secretary for Transport, Communication and Infrastructural Development Mr Patson Mbiriri was most convincing when he explained why it had been decided to hire Zimra to collect the tolls.

They have the expertise in collecting taxes and accounting for them in some detail. And the fact that the cash collected is deposited straight into the roads authority account means that it is not borrowed or reassigned by a parsimonious Treasury.

It is as unlikely that a group of qualified engineers will know as much as professional tax collectors just how to collect a tax, and more importantly also know how to stop people cheating. In the same vein, a gang of tax-collectors will know less than those engineers how to design and build a road.

But we are a trifle concerned over Zimra’s fee — 10 percent of the cash collected. This might need to be renegotiated now that everyone knows both the costs of collection and the sums collected.

Zimra obviously need to cover their costs and perhaps be allowed a small mark-up, but tax departments should be collectors, not earners, of vast sums.

Like the committee we are a bit worried about the lack of fencing along major highways.

We agree that it is vulnerable to theft and vandalism, but feel that it should be possible to come to some arrangements with landholders along the road. They probably want to keep their livestock off the road as much as the drivers want it off.

So landholders might well agree to guard and police the fences.

Signs need to be replaced, and replaced with materials that are not going to be stolen or sold.

If Sadc has yet to come to a final decision on what signs should look like, then Zimbabwe should do some pushing. In any case, there are now global standards and Sadc will no doubt adopt these.

The tollgates have been successful, they are bringing in respectable sums for road building and maintenance, and cheating is either non-existent or negligible.

Now we just need to start working down the list of priorities to get our roads back into the state they were in a decade ago.

Labels: ROADS, TOLL ROADS

posted by MrK @ 9:43 AM