With the plan to re-introduce tolling as a test run on the Abuja-Makurdi highway, the Federal Government has come to terms with one important reality of the country’s public life – Nigeria cannot achieve a faster infrastructure revolution with the sluggish traditional equity funding model or budgetary allocations but through innovative alternatives, such as road use tax. The current yearly budgets for roads amount to a paltry amount, given the spending needed to fully develop the country’s road network to support faster economic growth and increase productivity.
  
Today, the specific financial outlay the country needs to invest in building motorable and smart highways is a matter of guess. However, a report puts a three-decade spending need at $3 trillion. Assuming the total FG budget, at its 2025 value, is channelled to road construction and nothing else, it would take the government nearly 85 years to invest such an amount. Supposing the 30-year idea road expenditure estimate is true, the current spending is a mockery. Last year, the government allocated N77 billion to road projects, putting the per capita spending at N355.
 
Thus, any plan to fund road construction with conventional budgeting would, at best, amount to scratching the surface of the huge road infrastructure, making alternative funding models such as build, operate and transfer (BOT) and road user charge (tolling) inevitable. The idea of road tolling, as a road infrastructure construction and maintenance funding scheme, is as old as the modern economy with Nigeria achieving a fairly success story in this regard until 2003 when the administration of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo dismantled the toll plazas. This phase reflects the country’s primitive tolling system. That exercise reportedly cost about N500 million, a whopping sum. 
  
But to achieve the self-funding objective of tolling roads, the government must avoid the temptation of seeing this as another ‘job for the boys’ and build accountable mechanisms into the revenue collection and utilisation model. Very importantly, tolling should not be an ingenious or disingenuous way to unduly tax citizens, given that transportation costs will invariably reflect on the prices of consumer goods, and thereby impact badly on inflation. The government should ensure that tolls charged are humane and affordable. Recovery of road cost price should be done over a reasonable period, not proposed as a short-term facility. Maintenance and security should be the main consideration; these are the public components of the tolling collaboration.
  
As a starter, manual toll collection would not only turn the tolling points into garage scenes. Still, it would also reduce the accountability level with much of the revenue not remitted after daily operations much less coming into the government coffers. A smart way to plug the revenue loopholes is to hand over the management to private sectors with a commercial framework clearly articulated, agreed and communicated to all parties involved.
  
Interestingly, road tolling is revenue-driven and serves as security, environment and traffic control. Sadly, the gigantic toll plazas of the Abuja-Makurdi Highway, a real-life testing ground of the returning road tolling, being shared on social media do not suggest that Nigeria has improved beyond the pre-2003 system when toll gates were not different from open markets. There are several reasons this country cannot replicate a situation where motorists jockey for positions to reduce travel time delays caused by toll points. Security concern is the number one reason the government must dismantle the plaza tolling arrangement for smarter options, which the modern world has in abundance.

Established road tolling countries, including some African countries, now select and choose from different options such as electronic tolling collection, open road tolling, overhead camera, odometer tolling and satellite tolling systems in place of archaic toll booths. The new options have proven to be smarter, environmentally friendly, more economical, and less burdensome to road users. They are also more compatible for tracking insecurity challenges and other hazards as they are technology enablers. In some countries, the facilities are configured with feedback loops for real-time communication with security operatives. Nigeria should consider these best practices in its desire to return to road tolling.        
  
The growing urbanisation is gradually turning cities such as Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Lagos into hells for road users. This has also placed congestion pricing, a subset of user charges, on the table. But Nigeria must necessarily understudy countries like Singapore, London and Stockholm – three countries that have become real-testing grounds for this form of tax. The idea of congestion pricing appears far-fetched for a country struggling with survival issues like Nigeria. However, in designing road demand control measures, it makes some sense to put all cards on the table. In any case, inner city roads need equal if not more attention than highways.
  
The real deal in road usage price is demand management, which supposes that users should have varied options besides driving. They should be free to choose to use public transport as opposed to driving, meaning that the public transport system must be effective and functional. They should be able to travel on trains when they want to, and not on the road, and still get considerable comfort. This brings the need to develop a multi-modal transport scheme that is efficient, affordable and reliable. It becomes a necessity, thus, to reactivate or reinvigorate the rail system across the country while reinventing the culture of train rides.        
  
The journey to building an efficient road system should not leave any section of society behind. The government should walk the talk about private-public partnerships and efficient multi-modal transport systems. Citizens must also answer the call to support efforts to create a sustainable funding mechanism.