How Ghana's parliament handed the country's towing business to one company

The Ghanaian parliament recently approved of the implementation of a towing levy to be imposed on vehicle owners.

The expected fees to be paid range from GHS20 ($4) to GHS200($45), depending on the tonnage for both commercial and non-commercial.

Though the collection was halted in June after public outcry, it is scheduled to start rolling on September 1, 2017 after the country's parliament reviewed and approved the levy.

The National Road Safety Commission (NRSC) in the country introduced the service in order to rid the country’s roads of broken down vehicles that are abandoned and which cause accidents.

The contract was awarded to the Road Safety Management Limited (RSML), a private company incorporated in 2011 together with four other unnamed allied companies.

According to the contract, 85% of all levy proceeds shall go to the RSML. There is no cap on actual sums. There is no variation of scope based on higher than expected revenue. There are no mechanisms to review the percentage based on deliverables.

The other beneficiaries of the contract are NRSC who will earn 5 percent, the Ghana Police Service also at 5 percent, Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) at 2.5 percent while the remaining 2.5 percent will go to the Ministry of Finance.

The contract is for a period of 20 years but renewable after every two years. The funds collected are expected to be lodged into a special Towing Service Account.

Questions relating to whether the payments will be tied to a number of vehicles towed and how the activities of the towing services are going to be monitored are yet to be answered.

However, a lot of people in the country described the levy as controversial.

Director of Development Research at IMANI Ghana Bright Simmons has described the contract awarding scheme as fraudulent. According to him "in fact, the Ghana Road Safety Commission (“NRSC”) entered into an agreement with RSML in 2013 to undertake this towing program only to discover that the law as it stood then didn’t allow them to impose their previous levies. So with RSML’s help, they assembled some drafters and set about crafting a legal regime to facilitate something they had already committed to doing".

He further expressed worry as to why only RSML (the Zoomlion subsidiary) and the NRSC are parties to the contract.

"What some of us are worried about is the shoddy approach this whole program has taken and the RSML's obscene profits.

Industry players such as the Ghana Committed Drivers Association (GCDA) has also served notice of a nationwide demonstration to push for the repeal of the recently passed mandatory towing levy.