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Nigeria: Road Safety Corps and Seat Belt Exploitation

Isa Muhammad Inuwa

31 October 2007

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opinion

Ever since the "Federal Road Safety Corps" was founded during Nigeria's military regime under General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida in the late 1980s to date, the body which was meant to regulate the activities of road users has been left swinging in limbo and at the mercy of lack of clear-cut directions and responsibilities as far as control of driving vehicles is concerned.

The dilemma seems to have arisen from the fact that the Road Safety Corps came as a child of circumstance when Babangida's regime introduced some auxiliary projects without backing them up with thought and thorough objectives. This made FRSC to have its functions clashing with those of VIOs and at times that of traffic wardens.

This particular reality made the body to look like a kind of hybrid which neither belongs to the police nor to the traffic officers and to the extent that at different occasions, the Corps has been merged with the police and at another separated from the police, while the police themselves look at the Road Corps as alien to their service. The present situation is that the Federal Road Safety Corps has outlived the regime that founded it, but it is yet to gain its real identity and yet to fix its roots like the rest of federal government bodies. Worse still, road accidents, which the Corps were thought to control and minimise, kept rising astronomically year in, year out, with the body still in existence and its staff being paid salaries with Nigerian taxpayers' money.

The great irony is that despite the Federal Road Safety Corps, Nigerian roads are no longer safe and they are still unsafe as highway massive accidents and city and town accidents mainly caused by notorious motorcyclists known as "achaba" continue to snuff out the lives of innocent citizens. This particular fact tends to raise the question: what actual purpose is the Road Safety Corps serving? Is it only serving in recording the number of deaths and related aggregate of death tolls over the years, as they occur on our roads? Please, can that be enough?

Possibly and obviously, it is the attempt of proponents and guardians of the Corps in covering its disabilities that they ended up camouflaging, thereby introducing and insisting on the use of seat belt by motorists; the idea which in my opinion, is wrongly applied. Everyone knows the idea behind using seat belt, but is it enough to emphasise on using belt by motorists on the one hand and ignore the imposition of using helmets by motorcyclists?

Or is it due to the fear by the Corps about the uncontrollable and rugged habit of commercial motorcyclists, the "okada riders" who would not consent to the idea of using helmets and would end up fighting the Road Corps officers? The result now is that the law seems to be too lopsided and unbalanced, whereby the Road Corps takes pleasure in molesting respected, peace-loving and gentle car owners who would not quarrel with them on the roads because of their decorum. The respected Nigerians are therefore being harassed and fined for the simple reason that they do not or even forget to use seat belt, especially during township driving (not even inter-state or highway driving).

Another reason why the Road Corps law is despotic, made of nepotism and selective is that the officers tend to allow vehicle owners that carry any government sign or the ones that look so luxurious and flashy to go scot-free for fear of offending a highly-connected or highly-positioned person, which could make them to lose their job or fetch them a dismissal. This selective justice with road gendarmes and the police is even more pronounced in the case of arresting users of the so-called tinted glasses, at which some selected individuals are allowed to use them while other citizens are punished for doing so.

This writer therefore considers the work of the Road Corps of emphasising the use of seat belt in the town and leaving other fundamental issues like using hard drugs by drivers and riders, reckless driving by commercial motorcyclists and more importantly checking the menace of highway driving as highly narrow and naïve. Some people have even begun to complain that the FRSC officers were only seeking for dirty money and bribery by concentrating on the city alone, while it is a fact that highway driving is much riskier and accident prone, as far as car driving is concerned. Those holding this view added that members of the Corps are seen to be more serious and strict whenever big seasonal festivities such as Xmas and Eid are approaching, so that they can fill their pockets in readiness for the grand occasions.

Whether the above assumption is true or false, the glaring fact is that the road gendarmes were being used by their superior officers or rather by the higher authorities in order to further subjugate the common citizens, to demonstrate to them that the power of dealing with the common man is still in existence and that he is nothing more than a subject and a commoner. Whichever is the case, the law of checking seat belts in cars alone is too primitive and selective, because even in the cars, it is the driver alone (according to Kano Corps) that should have his belt on.

In this case, passengers are exempted and are regarded as not worthy in terms of possible accidents. Likewise the tricycles lack belts for the driver and passengers, while in the case of commercial buses, only the driver can use belt with the exception of the overloaded passengers. For the motorcycle riders, helmets were not used in spite of the numerous accidents they cause daily. All of the above facts and much more indicate and prove the selectiveness of the FRSC in their law, which fall far behind curbing the recurring accidents and loss of precious lives on our roads. Finally, this leads to exploitation rather than correction of road users.

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