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Nairobi parking fee target unrealistic, says senior official

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Parking attendants issue a motorist with a parking ticket on a Nairobi street. The county budget committee says money is being lost through corruption. FILE

A City Hall official has dismissed the Sh5 billion parking fee revenue projections for the financial year 2014/15 as unachievable.

Tom Tinega, the accountant in charge of parking, said that the amount set by the county assembly’s budget and appropriations committee was not based on facts and could not be realised from the current 12,000 parking slots in the city.

The committee, in a report, said that a lot of money was being lost through corruption and recommended that a team be formed to investigate the losses.

But Mr Tinega differed. “It’s not possible. You have to consider the number of parking slots and how much we expect from them. You cannot set a figure when you do not have data on which to base it on.”

The report had attributed the losses to rogue employees and impostors posing as parking attendants, adding that the sector nets in excess of Sh250 million monthly.

But Mr Tinega told the Business Daily that on average, the monthly collection ranges between Sh170 million and Sh200 million a month, adding that the Sh250 million could only be realised between December and March.

The Nairobi County Treasury had initially set a Sh3.6 billion target for the sector in estimates it presented to the assembly before the figure was revised upwards.

According to Mr Tinega, the county can only hope to collect a maximum Sh3 billion from the sector, which will leave a Sh2 billion hole in City Hall’s Sh28.7 billion budget unveiled last week.

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Mr Tinega downplayed the amount that the 400 parking attendants could be filching away, saying that even if they were stealing Sh100,000 a day it could not make up the difference of Sh2 billion every year.

These leakages are expected to be addressed once the collection of parking fees goes cashless in the next two months.

Financial vendor JamboPay will be handling all revenue collection for the county and intends to do away with cash payments by the end of September. The firm has already started implementing its e-payment contract with City Hall with payment for land rates and single business permits going cashless last week.

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Parking fee collection will now be done through mobile, online and other cashless methods. County attendants will no longer collect cash from motorists. At Sh5 billion, parking fees is the biggest projected revenue earner for the next financial year, followed by land rates at Sh3.7 billion.

Mr Tinega said that the county was losing about Sh4 million monthly from parking areas taken by government ministries and agencies.

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