Tollbooths on the superhighway

By WAGA ODONGO

Posted  Monday, April 29  2013 

IN SUMMARY

• Putting tolls alongside fuel levies amounts to double taxation. Motorists have already rendered more than enough unto Caesar

Thika Road is considered the flagship project of Vision 2030 and is hailed as an all-round engineering marvel. It is a bit like a Stalinist project: large, expensive, “successful”, and painful to some... and soon motorists are going to have to pay for the pleasure of driving on the road.

The government has always muttered in low tones about the possibility of charging motorists who use the road, but we now have a date — the pain for the pleasure starts in January next year. Do not ask for whom the road tolls, because it tolls for thee, dear motorist.

Proposed rates indicate that motorists will pay for road usage per kilometre, and also depending on the vehicle’s size. The exact strategy on how this will be done is yet to be unveiled.

The plan to bill motorists per kilometre of road driven will necessitate the fitting of a GPS gadget. This only makes sense if more roads start charging tolls, which is why it seems particularly unfair to ask that only users of Thika Road fit a special odometer. All major roads will be forced to have tolls for it to seem even remotely fair. So the move to charge for roads will move to other main roads. Thika Road seems to be the first slated for this income-raising idea before it is trotted out nationally.

We have a byzantine set of taxes and fiscal alchemy at exactly how the roads are funded. The bulk of the funds goes to maintenance and a slim portion to new roads.

Toll roads are free market at its most visceral. Fuel duty seems fairer. At least you pay for something, not some dodgy right to road use. You pay for fuel by the litre and you pay the levy whether you are travelling on dirt roads or using the superhighway.

Fuel duty is good as it encourages usage of smaller, more efficient engines and punishes those who hate the environment and drive Range Rovers. It is a surprise that, despite the present negative balance of payments and price of petrol, we have not began pogrommes against Range Rover owners.

My point is that putting tolls alongside fuel levies amounts to double taxation. Motorists have already rendered more than enough unto Caesar. A public service vehicle owner has to think about fuel levy and road levy on fuel, paying for a driving licence, getting an annual traffic inspection, VAT on all replacement parts, the bloody sacco loan, Traffic Licensing Board, insurance, parking fees, a few bribes along the way and, soon, toll fees to strip the remaining meat off the bones of his business.

The roads authority has already tendered bids for private maintenance of the road and the results are expected next month. A company will be contracted to collect the toll.

That is a bad idea. A private company will be forced to charge road users more since part of the money will be used to maintain the road and a portion reserved for their healthy profit. It is not a stretch to imagine that KRA and the Roads Ministry could meet to cobble an adjunct department to manage tollbooths.

The cost of building tollbooths is set at a prohibitive Sh750 million, and collection is estimated to cost Sh30 million annually. If the price really was the problem, then the government could easily raise a bond against future revenue that is bound to be earned by the road and cover the costs.

Issuing a government bond will mean that the government maintains the rights to road usage and prices, at least in theory, will be lower. Getting a company to specifically collect tolls is unnecessarily adding a middleman in the transaction, it is transferring an easily monetised public asset to a private company to make money off it. Even before the deal is inked, it seems immoral.

This is not about rolling back the state and letting the private sector fill the gap because the state is still paying for the loan for the road. If the road was completely a private sector initiative, then you could include a private company to come in and wring the coins from motorists’ pockets.

The government has indeed talked about setting up public private partnerships (PPP) to construct infrastructure and companies who build the infrastructure get rights to charge users for its use.

Matt Taibi, in the book Griftopia, talks about how private companies have put restrictions on the usage of roads whose leases they have bought or been granted.

For example, the companies would not allow state governments to close roads for whatever reason because it would lead to a reduction in profits. They are interested in ensuring that as many people as possible keep using the road. So, for example, you could not close the road to stop the President’s motorcade from speeding by. You would have to pay the company a hefty fee in lieu of all the reduced income.

Rather than rush for PPPs, the government should set up bonds against future tolls that will be collected from the road infrastructure since Treasury is bound to be less avaricious than those foreign sovereign wealth funds and venture capitalists that often finance such projects.

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I refuse to be prudish, toilet paper is a dirty waste of trees

I was strolling down an aisle at the Sarit Centre branch of Uchumi recently when a woman keen on flogging merchandise approached me with a toilet paper offer.

I asked her to tell me about the product. Unsurprisingly, her only selling point was the price: It was cheaper than other brands. She did not know whether it was made from recycled paper or sustainable trees. She did not know how absorbent it was. She did not know how thick the loo roll was, whether it was one-ply, two-ply, or more. She had no idea about its biodegradability.

Next up was the mechanics. I asked her with a deadpan facial expression whether after use one should scrunch or fold the toilet paper. She dissolved into a series of blushes. She would not explain how the roll ought to be used since the wrapping did not have any explanations as to how it is used. She could not answer any of my questions concerning toilet paper and toilet paper use.

Here was a salesperson uniquely embarrassed and uninterested about the product she was selling.

It is extremely queer that we have this reticence over a bodily function that is both essential and unavoidable. It is simply getting rid of unused matter from the digestive system. There seems to be an unnecessary taboo against talking about going to the toilet.

You notice the prudishness in advertisements for sanitary pads; they always use a blue liquid as though the product is made for smurfs. No one dares use a liquid that is anywhere close to the real thing despite the fact that menstruation is a perfectly normal biological function that half the population experiences.

We have Victorian levels of prudishness that obscure an important fact; that toilet paper is very bad at its job. Yes, toilet paper is not the best tool to clean the dirtiest part of your body. It is bad for the environment, ineffective, and its use is the reason money is filled with faecal matter. Excuse me, dear reader, but taboos concerning bodily functions stop us from talking about this fact.

For example, in the morning, you do not wake up and clean yourself with toilet paper, then head out into the world. You use water and soap. Your hands do not get clean by simply wiping them with toilet paper now, do they?

We should not have silly squeamishness about basic bodily functions, least of all those who have to sell related products.

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Liberate Liberia from this Nairobi squalor

Most foreign embassies cling close to the UN in Gigiri and settle for an upmarket luxurious house large enough to host parties. Any African country with serious ambitions ought to have an embassy in Nairobi, because an embassy is a statement of intent, a projection of status, a signifier of presence. Location, size, and protections around it are all yardsticks to measure prestige.

In a matatu driving past Graffins College, I was surprised to see the Liberian flag flying from a building. That building did not fit the ambassadorial mound, so I decided to go back and check what a Liberian flag was doing fluttering there. I found out that it was a mini-me suitcase embassy better known as an honorary consulate. I used to think that honorary ambassadors were just paper pushers and did not proclaim their residences so brashly. I expected honorary embassies to belong to far-off countries (like Nepal) that you expect to have little or no contact with.

Nairobi is a regional hub and should be on the roll of every African country’s list of embassies. Either way, I am disappointed that Liberia would not set up a proper embassy and makes do with such a fledgling domicile.

Is he right? Send your comments to dn2@ke.nationmedia.com. Follow the online discussion at www.nation.co.ke/dn2

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