The belief by the Federal Government controlled by the All Progressives Congress (APC) that all Nigerians were responsible for the poor economic state of the country may have been the reason for the reintroduction of the tollgates on the federal highways. Not unmindful of the pain the tollgates will bring on commuters, government wants Nigerians to first taste the hardship before reaping hugely. The reintroduction of the tollgate has been likened to going to the purgatory where indescribable pain is said to exist before the individual is allowed to go on to enjoy the bliss.
According to Wikipedia, purgatory, in line with the belief of some Christians, is an intermediate state after physical death for expiatory purification.
The Federal Government of Nigeria is broke or so it seems. But the government has to run and, to do so, the government needs money. Since the managers of government cannot or are not ready to think of ways to make money, the citizens have to fund the government. Tax is the word and only way out.
In recent time, the government has been behaving like a drowning man who clutches on just anything around him, including empty straw, to enable him swim else he sinks. It appears restless in its quest to get all the money it can get to augment dwindling oil revenue.
Having squandered its enormous wealth, and borrowed itself blind, the government, like a dog on heat, is now looking for all the easiest means of generating more revenue to maintain its over-bloated civil service, and to continue to massage the flamboyant lifestyle of the big masters in the executive and legislative arms of government.
Until lately, government’s style had been to beam its searchlight on suspected treasury looters on the enemy camp and set its rampaging anti-graft dog, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) after such ‘criminals’ and, pronto, phantom charges are heaped on them. Such criminals get instant ‘justice’ the moment they return part of their loots to government coffers.
Now, in addition to the 50 percent increase in Value Added Tax (VAT) from 5 percent to 7.5 percent which will take effect from January 2020, Nigerians will also be paying for using Federal Government’s roads nationwide as toll gates, which gave way about 15 years ago, are returning to those roads.
When President Muhammadu Buhari, in his acceptance speech after winning the presidential election in March 2019, told Nigerians to prepare for tough times ahead, many did not take him seriously. Again, many did not understand what the president meant when he said he was taking Nigerians to the ‘Next Level’.
Apologists of the president interpreted that to mean taking the good people of Nigeria to the next level of El-Dorado. But to the discerning minds, it was clear to them that it was time to gird their loins and wait for the worst, because in Buhari’s first coming, the country never had it good.
Evidently, Buhari’s Next Level is here and Nigerians had better braced up for it. The announcement by the Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, that government was considering returning the tollgates on Nigerian highways, came like a thunderbolt. Government’s explanation is that it is time to build a ‘better’ nation and people should suffer the pain to make that happen.
The meaning of pain is not lost on Nigerians who have the ‘privilege’ of moving from one point in the country to another. The roads are simply a metaphor for pain and suffocation. And those who use them get a good dose of same, no matter how short the distance covered.
“It is not yet clear what government really means by reintroducing toll gates on roads that have totally collapsed,” Femi Abaoba, a civil engineer, said in a telephone interview. Available record shows that Nigeria has the largest road network in West Africa and second largest in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The total road network in the country is estimated at between 195,000 kilometres and 198,000 kilometres. About 2,627 kilometres of the roads are dualised.
In Nigeria, roads are owned by the three tiers of government. Approximately 18 percent is owned by the Federal Government, 16 percent by the state while 66 percent is owned by local governments. Abaoba noted that the condition of these roads is so poor that only about 35 percent of the network is motorable.
“This means that over 60 percent of Nigerian roads are impassable and because in the last five years no major rehabilitation, not to talk of constructing new ones, has been done, the situation should be worse,” Abaoba said.
The interpretation many Nigerians have given to government planned reintroduction of toll gates on these roads is that government wants to send the citizens to purgatory.
In other words, by the time Nigerians must have suffered intense pain, even on the roads, they would come out better citizens and government would have realised its Next Level agenda. This, indeed, is a purgatory or expiatory experience which Nigerians shouldn’t and would rather not have.
In 2003, former President Olusegun Obasanjo had ordered the demolition of tollgates. His reason was that roads should be maintained through revenue from the increase in fuel pump price. The former president explained further that the N63 million collected daily from tolling was insignificant and that the facilities constituted inconvenience to motorists and encouraged corruption.
But Buhari government, six years after, sees justification to return the toll gates, not minding that over 90 percent of these roads are in worse conditions than when Obasanjo removed the tolls on them.
The works minister was quick to offer explanations. He told reporters after a Federal Executive Council meeting where the decision to reintroduce the tolls was taken that “there is no reason we can’t toll. There was a policy of the government to abolish tolls or, as it were, dismantle toll plazas. But there is no law that prohibits tolling in Nigeria today.”
Continuing, Fashola said, “We expect to return toll plazas. We have concluded the designs of what they will look like, what materials they will be rebuilt with, and what new considerations must go into them. What we are looking at now and trying to conclude is how the bank end runs.”
The minister’s explanation leaves no one in doubt that the reintroduction of the toll gates has gone beyond consideration to practical action. “I want to let you know that what we are doing is not accidental, we are being deliberate and methodical; we are collecting information to know what to do, which place and what,” he said.
What is holding back the return of the toll gates, from the minister’s explanation, is that the government is faced with the need to acquire more land to establish the width of the toll plazas because they are looking at 10-lane plazas in order to have more outlets.
From all the explanation given by the minister, it was stated or even implied that the government was going to reconstruct the roads before tolling them which is the normal thing to do.
“What we are going to do is a situation where government will be putting the cart before the horse. If government is going to collect tolls from users of its roads, the natural thing to do is to make the roads motorable so that people who will pay the tolls will see value for their money,” said William Idoko, a transport operator whose fleet of buses plies Lagos to the Eastern parts of the country.
Idoko said that the government should rethink this move. He explained that the situation of the roads coupled with the present insecurity on the highways make the return of toll gates in Nigeria of today both ill-advised and ill-conceived. “The next best thing to do at the moment is to put the roads in perfect order and fight the insecurity on them,” he counseled.
Though the minister does not agree completely that the tolls would fund the repair of the roads, a critical look at the federal government’s 2020 Budget Appropriation which it present to a joint section of the National Assembly last Tuesday shows that not much will be done on the roads in that fiscal year.
From an aggregate expenditure of N10.33 trillion budget proposal, N262 billion was appropriated for the Works and Housing Ministry. Though that is the highest sectoral allocation in the budget appropriation, experts say it is clearly a drop of water in the ocean, given the deep rot in the road infrastructure and the housing deficit in the country.
Works and Housing are two big and strategic ministries rolled into one. Until August this year when President Buhari inaugurated his cabinet and unbundled the ministry, Power was part of it. In the current 2019 fiscal year, the Ministry of Power, Works and Housing has budget allocation of N428.4 billion. This is higher than the N127 billion appropriated for Power and the N262 billion for works and housing put together by about N39 billion.
“This means that Nigerians will still have more days and years to endure collapsed road infrastructure in the country. It also means that those who are hoping that, through government’s policies and programmes in the housing sector, they will be able to own homes will have to endure more days before their dreams are realised,” said Yemi Madamidola, as estate manager.
This means that government is really banking on money to be collected from the toll gates for road maintenance and reconstruction of those that have collapsed. “It makes no sense and the government is not being considerate given the level of hardship in the land,” he lamented.
Like Madamidola, many other Nigerians kick against the reintroduction of tolls on Nigerian highways which, to them, is part of executive bullying in the country. Besides the punitive intent and political considerations that go into it, Nigerians don’t always see the benefits of paying tolls.
National chairman, Nigerian Institution of Highway and Transportation Engineers, Oludayo Oluyemi, was reported to have faulted the move, saying: “You can’t tell me there is a good road in the federation except within the Federal Capital Territory. No interstate highway in this country is good. So, how many of them do they think they would get tolls from?”
Oluyemi therefore, canvassed road sector reform because, according to him, “that is the most appropriate thing for us as a nation. The introduction of tolls will not solve any problem.”
To Kunle Mokuolu, president of Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE), a permanent solution to road problems in the country would be to engage the private sector with the government acting as the regulator. According to him, it is better for the government to regulate the private sector than regulate itself.
But Wale Babalakin, chairman/CEO of Bi-Courtney Limited, has his reservation in this respect. He says public private partnership (PPP) initiative is under threat in Nigeria because government officials do not respect terms of contracts and agreements, but see private investors in public infrastructure as either competitors or inferior partners.
A major disturbing dimension to toll gates in Nigeria is the politics that is brought into its consideration and implementation. Often times it is used as a political tool against some regions of the country or to get at the camp of a perceived political enemy.
It is said that there can be no smoke without fire. Be that as it may, if an unconfirmed report obtained by BDSUNDAY is anything to go by, it means that the planned reintroduction of toll gates will hit some sections of the country more than others.
According to the report, a glance into what it called ‘Toll Gate Designate’ shows that of the six geopolitical zones of the country, the South Eastern zone is leading with 56 toll gates, followed by South West zone which will have 22 toll gates.
The South-South zone comes next with 21 toll gates; North Central, 14 toll gates; North West, 12 toll gates, while North East has 9 toll gates.
If this happens, it means that the South East, arguably, Nigeria’s weeping child, will have to contend with more punitive ‘federal presence’ in addition to the numerous police check-points which are no different from extortion centres on all the collapsed federal highways in the zone.
Whichever way the government wants to achieve this, Nigerians would want to see justification for its implementation. It is not enough to erect gates on roads and start collecting tolls. The road user should see why he has to pay the tolls. The roads have to be user-friendly and to make the roads user-friendly is to make them motorable.
What government means is that “if you commute across Nigeria in the next couple of weeks, you would have to pay an amount as you make the journey from one state to another. The amount is yet to be stated, however. A ‘toll’ is essentially defined as a charge to use a bridge or road. You can also call it a tax on roads.”
Fashola’s love for toll gates is legendary. In November of 2017, Fashola was said to have told lawmakers that if Nigerians craved smooth federal roads, they should be ready to pay for it. He advocated that monies accrued from tolling would be used to maintain federal highways all year round.
Critics say that the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), which presided over the affairs of the country for 16 years, though had its downsides, but that such did not include the kind of hardship Nigerians have been subjected to in the last five years and “which is being taken to the next level”.
“Nigerians could recall that the PDP administration, in keeping with our determination to ensure the wellbeing and economic prosperity of our citizens, dismantled toll gates, cut tax profiles and applied our energies towards wealth creation,” said Kola Ologbondiyan, the party’s national publicity secretary.
Ologbondiyan described the planned return of the toll gates as an “executive bullying which cannot be justified under any guise as it will lead to more increase in costs of goods and services across the country.
He recalled that recently, President Buhari approved the increase of Value Added Tax (VAT) from 5 percent to 7.2 percent despite outcry by Nigerians who are also being made to pay exorbitant tariffs for electricity and other essential services.
CHUKA UROKO
