The Ministry of Roads and Highways’ reintroduction of tolling — up to sixty-six toll points nationwide, procured as a Public-Private Partnership and built on modern Multi-Lane Free-Flow (MLFF) technology — replaces a manual, cash-based regime that was abolished after years of revenue leakage, congestion, and public distrust. Our position is that this reintroduction should be treated by government and investors alike as a scalable platform business, not a single, indivisible concession.
The programme’s own scope already points this way: thirty-eight existing toll points in need of upgrading, twenty-eight proposed new locations including major urban interchanges, and a stated qualification bar (proven MLFF deployments, a minimum processing capacity of 300,000 transactions a day) that favours experienced consortia over first-time entrants. We would argue for packaging the programme in three dimensions at once — geography (phased corridor rollout, piloted on the highest-traffic routes before national scale-up), technology layer (separating roadside infrastructure, the central payments platform, and OBU distribution so different classes of investor can enter at the layer that matches their risk appetite), and service line (unbundling the procurement, workforce training, and physical and cyber asset-integrity contracts that sit around the core toll concession). This lets capital and delivery capacity enter incrementally, in step with demonstrated performance, rather than requiring one consortium to underwrite the entire network up front.
The Ministry’s own planning-stage cost data — roadside equipment in the range of USD 100,000–300,000 per station, a central system estimated at USD 30–50 million, and annual operating costs benchmarked as a percentage of capital investment — is unusually transparent for a programme at this stage, and it gives financiers a workable basis to model tariff sensitivity and payback before committing to full due diligence. Government’s task now is to hold that transparency through procurement; investors’ task is to structure participation to match the programme’s modularity rather than waiting for a single, monolithic award.
AFR