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Zinara is trying to make the payment of tolls at its tollgates as painless and as fast as possible, on the quite reasonable assumption that while people will accept they have to pay taxes they find it intolerable to queue for more than a few seconds to pay these.

So, as other tolling authorities have done, they want a system that is simple, as least so far as users are concerned even in the equipment and software is sophisticated, accurate, works in almost any circumstances, including when Zesa power is off and the network is down, and is fast. The target of 7 seconds is acceptable.

The second smart move by Zinara was to contract the innovation hub of the Bindura University of Science Education to set it up. 

Even a couple of years ago the natural path would have been to seek an external company or consultant, get something that needed a lot of adjustment and probably the import of some fancy hardware, fly in foreign team to do the complex adjustments, and in short spend a lot of money to collect money, instead of seeing more money go to maintaining and building roads.

BUSE are not necessarily reinventing the wheel, but the specifications required by Zinara, if Zinara is thinking as we hope they are, mean that the solutions have to fit Zimbabwean conditions. 

For a start the machine readers need to be either already owned by Zinara or be readily available in Zimbabwe. 

The flow of money from driver to Zinara has to plug into the existing Zinara finance system; no one needs to spend vast sums on buying a new finance system. 

The cards, and when you think about it we are talking about more than one million, have to be reasonably priced and easy to produce and load in Zimbabwe. There need to be a lot of places, with the machine readers, where people can load their cards with zero problem. 

And because tollgates tend to be semi-isolated the whole system has to be able to operate off grid for power and off line for operations. We have load shedding and power faults, but Zinara like many businesses will already have the back-up at its tollgates, probably battery power fed by solar panels for a 24/7 operation. 

On the ICT side, while data needs to flow to the central Zinara database it does not have to do this in real time. Data can be stored if necessary at the tollgate and sent when some fault has been fixed. We do not need messages saying “no network available” or a cable fault being noticed by drivers, let alone slowing anything down. 

This is where using the local technical contractor, in this case BUSE, makes so much sense. The whole system can be designed from scratch to fit the technology available and the needs of both Zinara and the drivers.

Zinara will need to go further than just getting the technology right though. The system will only really work when all drivers have the pre-loaded cars. 

While those using the cards can get through a tollgate quickly, a lot of the benefit disappears if that same driver needs to queue for 15 minutes to get to the toll gate because the bunch of drivers in front are not using the cards.

It will be necessary to make these compulsory. Of course there will be some who still will not bother, and will have to be issued with the card and put in the money at a tollgate. The important policy will two-fold, making the card the only way to go through a gate, but having a separate parking area and buying point at each toll gate where drivers without cards can obtain and load one while everyone else just drives through.

That way the person flashing a US$100 note for a $2 toll does not delay everyone else while Zinara staff find the small notes for change. We have all seen the hassle supermarkets have when customers paying in foreign currency need US$1 and US$5 notes in their change. 

Even mobile money payments and bank cards can cause delays, or at least it takes longer than 7 seconds to punch in phone numbers, PIN numbers and the like.

It will be important to have a lot of points for people to load their cards, and load them at odd hours of the day and night. It will also need to be possible for a driver to quickly find out how much is left in the card, so they know when to get a refill.

Choosing a card system that people can load on their phone from mobile and online banking seems almost essential. 

Drivers coming through border posts should be able to buy and load a card with the right amount of money for the toll gates they are likely to use at the same counter where the rest of their vehicle documents are cleared, and be able to do this at 3am.

Zinara will need to ponder the problems that Zupco faced with using tap cards for bus fares, another local system set up by Harare Institute of Technology. 

The hardware and software worked fine, the problem came from those paying and some bus conductors. Sometimes it was difficult to find a place to load, and being told to try a bank during banking hours was not always ideal, especially if the nearest bank doing the loading was 30km away.

Secondly many bus owners, even when on a Zupco franchise, did not accept cards, or pretended their reader was down so they could collect more desirable cash. 

And a lot of commuters simply did not want to bother even though the system made climbing aboard a bus a lot faster and more efficient. One problem was that it was hard to find your balance as well as difficult to reload after hours or in many areas. Zinara needs to fix that to make its system welcomed.

Zinara and BUSE are being smart, both as user and provider, in trying out the initial system at a single tollgate about half way between Zinara headquarters and BUSE, so both can see what sort of problems are likely to arise and can even talk to the drivers and find out what improvements they want.

This sort of try out is critical, since in the end no matter how wonderful the system is it still has to be used by drivers, and preferably by drivers who want to use it. 

The advantages are so many, but in the end there must be a box full of pros and an empty box for the cons. Then it will fulfil all the hopes.