Kampala has complained to the East African Community (EAC) Council of Ministers, accusing Tanzania of imposing different road users’ charges to partner states in the same trading bloc, which it said is a breach of Common Market Protocol.
The dispute is centred around a $500 fee that the Tanzanian government is charging each Ugandan truck traversing its territory, compared with $152 charged on Rwandan trucks- as a road development infrastructure levy.
Uganda argues that this fee is unfairly high, creates an uneven playing field, and goes against the efforts of promoting EAC as a single investment destination.
“It doesn’t create a fair playground and we have made appeals of this to the EAC Secretariat through their Council of Ministers, and even our members of the East African Parliament have been raising this issue.
“It does affect trade, because someone has to think twice to get goods through Tanzania because of these charges. They make trade with Tanzania very difficult, and this is not fair play because whatever the charges they must be uniform,” Uganda’s Minister of Works and Transport Katumba Wamala, was recently quoted by the The EastAfrican.
According to Mr Wamala, Uganda prefers dialogue for now, as it sees retaliation against Tanzania being likely to jeopardise trade between the two countries and the region’s integration process.
“I think it is a matter we can sort out and agree on,” he said.
Tanzanian Minister for Works, Transport and Communications, Isack Aloyce Kamwelwe said the process of reviewing and harmonising the toll charges across the region is currently under way.
“We are reviewing the document. We want to standardise the charges because we are charging $16 per 100 kilometres. I don’t know the exact price. My permanent secretary is working on the matter,” said Mr Kamwelwe.
During the Council of Ministers meeting held on September 11, it was noted that the matter has taken long to be resolved despite three bilateral meetings and interventions by the Heads of States.
Tanzania proposed to have another bilateral meeting to resolve the matter. However, Uganda said at the meeting that it was going to apply similar charges to what Tanzania is charging Ugandan trucks entering Tanzania, arguing that Kampala did not see the value in any other bilateral meeting.
The meeting agreed to escalate the matter to the policy level for guidance, but Tanzania proposed that the complaint should be referred to the Sectoral Committee on Transport for resolution.
Tanzania also informed the meeting that a similar complaint was reported and is yet to be resolved, in which Uganda does not recognise calibration certificates from its Weights and Measures Authority.
Non-tariff barriers (NTBs) remain a key challenge to east African integration since the establishment of Custom Union (CU) Protocol in 2005.
There are several initiatives in place to address NTBs in the EAC. First, the main instrument was the EAC Time-Bound Programme for Elimination of Identified NTBs (EACS, 2009). This strategy sought to come up with a list of NTBs reported by partner states and update them during quarterly NTB review meetings.
NTBs generally fall under four broad categories, namely, (1) measures having equivalent effect to custom duties and tariff, (2) quality and safety standard issues, (3) direct import ban and (4) custom and trade facilitation measures.
According to the EAC Common Market Scorecard 2016, the unresolved NTB were distributed as follows: Measures having equivalent effect to custom duties and tariff were 40 percent, customs and trade facilitation measures were 28 per cent, quality and safety standards were 24 percent and direct import ban were eight percent.
