The Federal Government has announced that plans are already underway to re-introduce tollgates on major highways across the country, adding that 38 points had been identified in the first phase of the re-introduction.
Speaking on Thursday, the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Raji Fashola, disclosed that a software would be used to monitor movement of vehicles at the tollgates.
“Clearly, tolling is coming,” the minister said while appearing before the Senate Committee on Federal Roads Maintenance Agency, chaired by Senator Magnus Abe, earlier today.
His words: “We have concluded plans to reintroduce tollgates across the country and we have finalised the design.
“It will be managed by the private sector and it will be located in the old places.
“Thirty-eight point across the country.
The minister however said the reintroduction of tollgates would start after the completion of the highways.
He said, “We are not going to ask road users to pay toll on a road that is not good. While the construction (of gates) is going on, we are working on the design. We want to standardise the design so that people when we ask people to come and bid for the construction, we can control what they are going to construct. They are going to construct the materials we have prescribed. We can also control the price so that nobody is bidding with disparage prices; there will be the floor and the ceiling. Your price will vary according to how many plazas you build and not because you claim to have used ‘foreign’ materials.
“The last part we are working on is the software that drives the management, audit, and payment of toll fares. We want to use the development that has taken place between when the old toll plazas were dismantled and now. There were no GSM and payment platforms as of that time as we have cellphones and cards now. We want to make it very easy for people to go to kiosks and buy toll cards and pay tolls.”
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