Wealth of The Nation:- Highway & Tolls

Politicians make all types of promises in their campaign, some of which they keep while others are simply a means to garner votes. After the dust settles and the euphoria subsides, they have to face the realities and examine what they can and cannot deliver.

The time for political campaigning is over; it is time to govern responsibly. The promise to abolish toll is one that must be addressed responsibly and not politically.

The recently, Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad it was not possible to have highways without collecting toll. due to the pressures on the government’s finances.

The Rakyat can understand that in order to meet these challenges, some economic promises may not be fulfilled for good reason especially due to the fallout from the 1MDB scandal, federal debt has now exceeded RM 1Trillion (USD 251Billion) , posing huge challenges to for the Government to pay RM 400 Billion to to abolish tolls in one go.

The main opposition to toll collection is not so much the need to pay for using highways but the the non-transparent terms of concessions given to concessionaires by the Government that now burden the Rakyat.

Tolled highways are BOT (build, operate and transfer) projects. The concessionaires who operate the highways are often also the contractors who build them. They inflate their costs both at the stages of construction and operation.

As the Rakyat, we have no say in inking these concession agreements, as our new government of the day please be transparent and accountable to us. Currently, these concession agreements, hidden behind the Official Secrets Act (OSA), obviously have hidden secrets which include compensation and toll rate clauses which the public is not privy to but you as our ruling state government can have the power to make this transparent to us.

The Government must also set up a committee to review each and every concession to rectify the unequal and unfair contracts. It must also appoint an independent group to estimate the costs of renegotiating or/and takeover of the tolled highways before making a final decision.

The committee will advice some improvements to the terms of the concession agreements to ensure the needs of the people are met, the interests of the government are preserved, and at the same time being fair to the concessionaires, as opposed to the terms of agreements under the previous leadership.

The renegotiation term must include an ‘exit clause’ where, if concessionaires had achieved their Internal Rate of Return, the concession agreement could be terminated earlier

To ease the burden of the Rakyat, the Government can arrange gradual or partial reduction of toll rates, introduction of different rates for different vehicle categories (for example, no toll for buses and public vehicles); and free or reduced rate for cars with three or more passengers.

In current financial burden, it would be necessary if there is good public transport. Hence, the Government should be directing all its transport expenditure into building a first- class public transport system so that the lower-income households would not need to be saddled with the financial burden of car ownership. This will immediately raise their level of disposable income. Thus, the MRT2 project need to resume as plan.

The Rakyat depends on Government of the day decisions for the future. The decision made will affects us. Do not fail us.

#Malaysia Economy, #MalaysiaHighwayToll