The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Transport has demanded that the Zimbabwe National Road Administration (Zinara) reverses a deal it entered with a South African company to collect revenue at nine tollgates along the Plumtree-Mutare Highway.
BY RICHARD CHIDZA
The Dextor Nduna-chaired committee yesterday told senior Zinara executives that the deal needed to be relooked at in order for the arrangement to benefit the country.
“I put it to you that it is within your power to reverse the arrangement if you wanted. This can happen until such time when Inter-toll has been vetted by the relevant security institutions in the country,” an exasperated Nduna said.
Zinara board chairperson Albert Mugabe responded: “Certainly, as an arm of government there is scope to do that (reverse the deal).”
Mugabe, Zinara acting chief executive officer Moses Juma, the parastatal’s technical partner in the implementation of the Zimbabwe Integrated Transport Information Management System (Zimtis), Univern officials attended the hearing. The committee was, however, snubbed by the other partner South Africa’s Inter-toll, a subsidiary of Group Five, the company that constructed the Plumtree-Mutare Highway, which left Nduna seething.
Earlier Mugabe and Juma had told the committee that Inter-toll, which is managing the collection of revenue on the nine toll-plazas along the Plumtree-Mutare road, was getting 21% of takings over and above all costs.
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“Univern is managing 17 toll-gates and gets 12,5% and we have a cost-plus-model with Inter-toll in which they get 21% after costs. We have been ordered by our parent ministry to have a relook at the arrangement and they have agreed to this. They did not argue much, but we also need to find ways of reducing the costs because some of them are not of their own making,” Mugabe said.
To this Nduna retorted: “I put it to you that they did not argue because they are actually surprised why they were engaged without proper security checks and procedures being followed so they do not have much to stand on.”
Nduna suggested that Zinara should move to integrate the systems by allowing Univern to take charge of everything “than give to a South African company that is yet to be security vetted”.
Zinara officials said the roads administrator was ready to launch Zimtis, but there were teething problems given the complexity of government structures that required the different arms of the State to work together.
Since 2009 when Zinara took over the collection of road revenues, the parastatal’s officials told the committee that they had thus far collected $180 million while the Traffic Safety Council of Zimbabwe that joined the integrated system in May had in the past two months collected $1 million against an annual figure of $264 000 before the current set-up.
