‘60pc tollgate fees goes to equipment hire’

Nqobile Tshili Chronicle Correspondent
THE rehabilitation of the country’s road network is being derailed by unavailability of equipment, forcing Zinara to spend 60 percent of tollgate revenue on hiring machinery. Zinara acting chief executive officer Moses Juma said this in Bulawayo on Friday while addressing delegates at the All Road Authorities Engineers’ Conference.

Juma said spending 60 percent of the generated funds on hiring machinery was retrogressive as most of the country’s roads have surpassed their 25-year-lifespan and needed re-doing.

“We’re spending 60 percent of the revenue generated in tolling to hire equipment. This is unsustainable,” said Juma. He however said the problem is set to ease next year after the government acquired road building equipment from Belarus.

Juma said Zinara is being short-changed by contractors who charge per hour for their equipment instead of charging for output. “This is the model that we want to encourage councils to adopt, performance based contracts. In the past we’ve been content that if a grader is done in 20 hours we pay them so much,” he said.

“Now we want to know that if it worked for 20 hours what will be the output. So we want to link the output and the remuneration. We expect our contractors to perform going forward.”

He said local authorities should account for how they use money released to them by Zinara. Ten more toll gates, he said, will be constructed starting next year as funding has been raised.

“In 2016 I’m going to fund the addition of 10 more tollgates which will give my office additional revenue or funds which I intend to disburse to you road authorities,” said Juma.

He urged local authorities to engage in Public Private Partnerships saying Zinara was excelling through them. He said embracing of information communication technologies (ICTs) was a must for revenue collectors as it promotes transparency.

“We increased revenue collection by almost 100 percent after computerising tolling. I’ve been looking ahead and we encourage councils to adopt these models, computerisation of your systems especially if you’re a revenue collector. Our experiences reveal that manual collection systems have a lot of loopholes so let’s embrace computerisation if you’re a revenue collector,” he said.

Juma reiterated President Robert Mugabe’s position that road construction needs to be taken seriously as it is expensive. He said Zinara will embark on quality control management to ensure that contractors do up-to-standard work.