KCCA collects Shs5m revenue as park user fees

By Our Reporter

21^st Feb 2022

Kampala Capital City Authority-KCCA has collected only an estimated Shillings five million in park user fees, more than a month since resuming the collections.

In 2020, the cabinet resolved to reinstate the charges that President, Yoweri Museveni suspended in 2017 following complaints by the taxi operators of exorbitant charges.

The operators were paying 120,000 Shillings every month.

The Minister for Local Government, Raphael Magyezi then issued a statutory Instrument indicating that vehicles carrying between seven to twenty passengers, including taxis, would pay 720,000 Shillings annually.

This would apply to vehicles operating within KCCA jurisdiction.

When the fees were reinstated, collections didn’t start immediately because the government wanted to first issue route charts to taxis.

The Works Ministry issued temporary charts in 2020, which expired at end of 2020. There was a plan to issue permanent route charts in 2021 but this is yet to happen.

Vehicles with the same capacity but operating beyond KCCA jurisdiction would be required to pay 840,000 Shillings while those with sitting capacity from 21 passengers to over sixty would pay an annual fee of 2.4 million Shillings.

KCCA Director Revenue Collection, Sam Serunkuma says that they started collecting the fees on 1st January but have so far only collected about 5 million Shillings.

Serunkuma links the low collections to a lack of seriousness on the part of taxi operators in Kampala. He says they are in talks with KCCA management to compel defaulters to meet the fees annually.

Mustafa Mayambala, the chairman of Uganda Transport Development Agency (UTRADA), says that taxi operators are willing to make the payments but some are disappointed with the recent takeover of part of the old taxi park where they work from.