THE DECISION TO SCRAP ROAD TOLL ILL-CONCEIVED- PK SARPONG

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The reintroduction of the road tolls is a tacit admission that the decision to scrap it was ill-conceived. I support the reintroduction.

I am, however, not in tune with the mode of the toll as it is being brought back. If we are to pay the GHC1 and GHC.50 as we used to pay, then very little would be realized from the tolls.

With less than GHC80 million realized from road tolls, this is too meagre an amount to make any substantial or meaningful contributions to our revenue generation.

Since the old amounts appear to be what have been tabled for discussion and approval, I suggest that we can triple the amounts charged.

More importantly, we should change the mode of collection of the tolls. We should automate the system. We cannot run away from the fact that some of the collectors pocket some of the monies.

They make monies at the expense of the nation and pragmatic systems must be used to collect the monies instead of using people to do same.

We can pay the tolls like we pay road worthy. Drivers can pay a specified amount depending upon the type of car one uses for a whole year so that a card can be given to such drivers to use as passage when they get to toll booths.

This will rope in more drivers as the revenues realized can be used to construct roads anywhere in the country. In other words, no driver can say that he doesn’t ply roads with toll booths and, therefore, must not be made to pay since the revenues realized can be used to construct roads in places where there are no toll booths.

We can do a lot with this reintroduction of road tolls if we want to make something substantial out of same.