adminmaintain non-national roads in their areas.
The theory is fine. The practice is not.
Roads are still in bad shape and many are getting worse.
There are a number of problems translating theory into practice.
First the cost of collecting the fees and running the associated administration, along with the capital costs of establishing toll gates, have absorbed large sums.
We even have Zinara chief executive Mr Frank Chitukutuku boasting on Wednesday that Zinara has so far paid out US$80 million on toll gates and their staff, and plans to spend a lot more as it builds a swathe of brand new tollgates, each costing US$1 million.
We stress that the US$80 million is the sum spent on collecting toll fees; this is money not spent on roads.
The second problem is that traffic is lighter than originally thought.
Zinara has always worked on the number of vehicles registered rather than the much smaller number of vehicles actually on the road.
It is clear that almost half of all registered vehicles are not on the road, and that many will never return to the road, having been broken up or abandoned.
Capital and administrative charges thus consume a higher percentage of income than was planned.
Zinara first built fairly basic toll gates. This is what has absorbed the capital element of that US$80 million spent on tollgate capital and administrative costs.
These were adequate, although better facilities for staff were needed at many. We would have supposed that a gradual upgrade, funded by a fixed and modest percentage of toll income, would within a few years have transformed many of the tollgate facilities while still allowing the bulk of toll income to be spent on repairing and upgrading highways.
Zinara disagrees.
On Wednesday the first of a new pattern of tollgate, now called a toll plaza, was officially opened near Bulawayo.
The old tollgate was torn down and scrapped.
Construction has already started on the first batch of similar new tollgates, each to cost US$1 million. Each new toll plaza will absorb at least 7 months toll income that it collects, excluding the salaries paid to staff and other collection costs.
So clearly we cannot expect to see any toll income, or to be kind any significant toll income, being spent on roads this year.
The willingness to divert such a significant percentage of toll income into building US$1 million toll plazas appears to be a desire to “look modern” rather than collect much more money.
We think this is the wrong priority.
Far better, in our view, would be to retain the existing toll gates but divert a modest percentage of each tollgates collection, and by modest we mean under 5 percent, to improvements.
Booths for staff on duty, better rooms for them when off duty, are the obvious starting points. Electric booms and the like can follow in the years to come and brand new structures can wait until the present ones have reached the state when they are no longer economic to repair.
Some, and unfortunately Zinara appears to be in this group, that Zimbabwe should present a sophisticated and modern look at its “toll plazas” to impress visitors and other toll users.
They are wrong.
What would impress everyone using our roads is better roads.
In the 1980s the Automobile Association used to issue weekly bulletins on the national roads; the bulk of these bulletins warned of where construction was in progress, where repair gangs were working and where resealing, that is applying a complete new layer of tarmac, was being done.
A modern bulletin would be dominated by where someone was filling in a pothole or applying a patch. No highway appears to have a resealing team, only contractors building toll plazas.
We totally agree that users should pay for the roads they use. What we and so many others object to is paying for the collection of fees rather than paying for decent roads.
Administration and capital costs associated with collection are unavoidable. But they should be a low percentage of what is collected, not the whole lot.
Online Reporter
Peter Tanyanyiwa