LATRA vs TABOA: Transport politics hits passengers

DAR ES SALAAM: THE bus operators’ chairman’s proposal deserves to be taken seriously, but not accepted at face value. On its surface, the request appears to be a response to a genuine cost shock.

EWURA’s April 2026 cap prices show a steep jump in pump prices, with Dar es Salaam petrol rising from 2,864/- per litre in March to 3,820/- in April, while diesel rose from 2,858/- to 3,806/-.

Land Transport Regulatory Authority (LATRA) itself has also acknowledged that transport fares are not determined by fuel alone and that other variables matter, including wages, repairs, maintenance, depreciation, exchange-rate movements and road conditions.

In that sense, the chairman’s argument that the pressure goes beyond fuel and includes tyres, spare parts, lubricants and what he called “miundombinu mibovu”, in my understanding maybe he meant “poor road infrastructure”, may conceptually be consistent with how the regulator itself thinks about fares.

But once the proposed numbers are laid beside the official fare schedule, a different picture emerges. LATRA’s current commuter bus fares are 600/- for routes up to 10 km, 700/- for 11–15 km, 800/- for 16–20 km, 900/- for 21–25 km, 1,100/- for 26–30 km and 1,300/- for 31–35 km. The chairman is reportedly asking for those bands to move to 850/-, 1,300/-, 1,700/-, 2,100/-, 2,500/- and 3,000/- respectively.

That would mean increases of 250/-, 600/-, 900/-, 1,200/-, 1,400/- and 1,700/-. In percentage terms, those are roughly 41.7 per cent, 85.7 per cent, 112.5 per cent, 133.3 per cent, 127.3 per cent and 130.8 per cent.

Those are not modest revisions. They are extremely aggressive increases, especially on the longer-distance commuter bands.

The most revealing part of the proposal is the internal pattern of the numbers themselves. If one divides each proposed fare by its route distance, the figures cluster very closely around an implied tariff of about 85/- per kilometre. The 10 km proposal gives exactly 85/- per km.

The 15 km proposal implies about 86/70 per km. The 20 km proposal returns to 85/- per km. The 25 km proposal gives 84/- per km. The 30 km proposal works out to about 83/30 per km and the 35 km proposal about 85/70 per km. That tight clustering strongly suggests these numbers were not arrived at by individually recalculating each route band from a detailed audited cost sheet. Rather, they look like they were built from a target “economic fare” of roughly 85/- per km, then rounded into politically communicable fare points. That is a rational negotiating method, but it is not the same thing as a transparently demonstrated regulatory tariff model.

That matters because LATRA’s present commuter fare structure is not a straight kilometre-for-kilometre commercial tariff. It is a socially moderated band system. Under the current approved fares, the effective price per kilometre actually falls as distance rises: About 60/- per km for the first 10 km band, about 46/70 per km at 15 km, 40/- per km at 20 km, around 36/- per km at 25 km, around 36/70 per km at 30 km and around 37/10 per km at 35 km.

In other words, LATRA’s model deliberately softens the burden on longer-distance commuters rather than charging the same economic rate across all distances. That reflects the regulator’s repeated concern with affordability, not just operator cost recovery. The 2022 commuter fare order explicitly says the review considered a holistic set of variables, including fuel prices, capital, wages, repairs, maintenance, depreciation, infrastructure conditions, macroeconomic variables and affordability.

This is where the proposal becomes vulnerable to criticism. By shifting toward a flat implied fare of around Sh85 per km, the operators are effectively asking LATRA to move away from the present affordability logic and toward a more commercial cost-recovery logic. For operators, that may make economic sense. For regulators and commuters, it is much harder to defend. The structure would place the heaviest burden on people travelling from more distant urban and peri-urban zones, who are often the riders with the least flexibility in their household budgets. It also sits awkwardly with the social design of LATRA’s commuter system, which has historically preserved a flat student fare.

The 2022 order kept student fares at 200/- across all listed route bands, and it also provided for a 20 per cent upward adjustment only for unpaved roads, not a wholesale re-pricing of the entire tariff framework.

None of this means the operators are wrong to complain about rising costs. In fact, LATRA’s own 2022/23 annual report gives them part of the argument. The report states that fuel is the major cost element in transport and contributes an average of about 40 per cent of total transport costs.

It also says exchange-rate fluctuations affect the cost of fuel, imported spare parts and other consumables. That means the chairman’s broader ecosystem argument is not empty rhetoric. If fuel prices spike while tyres, lubricants, spare parts and maintenance costs also rise and if road quality worsens wear and tear through potholes, delays and breakdowns, operators are right to say their cost base is being squeezed from several directions at once.

Poor road infrastructure is not just a complaint about inconvenience; it translates into higher suspension repairs, higher tyre replacement rates, more fuel burn in stop-and-go conditions and more downtime.

The real weakness, then, is not in the existence of cost pressure but in the scale of the requested pass-through. Even using LATRA’s own broad rule of thumb that fuel accounts for around 40 per cent of costs, a roughly 33 per cent fuel jump does not automatically justify fare increases of 85 per cent, 110 per cent or 130 per cent. To support numbers that large, operators would need to prove one of two things. Either current fares were already far below sustainable operating cost even before the April fuel shock, or non-fuel costs have been rising for so long and so sharply that the present tariff had become economically obsolete well before this latest spike.

That is possible, but it would require hard evidence: Audited operator accounts, route-by-route cost sheets, maintenance histories, tyre and spare-part import invoices, road-condition-linked repair data and realistic passenger load assumptions.

Viewed in sequence, the chairman’s interview and TABOA’s later reversal point in the same direction. Even before the strike was called off, the proposed fares already resembled an aggressive negotiating position more than a rigorously demonstrated final tariff.

The decision to suspend the strike after government talks strengthened that interpretation, suggesting the numbers were not only a cost-recovery argument but also a bargaining tool meant to increase pressure for a review.