Driving licence and the fight against corruption

Osita Chidoka, Corps Marshal, FRSC

It’s over a year this month since I applied to renew my driving licence at FRSC, Ojodu.

As usual when I got there earlier this month, I was given another extension of my temporary driving permit. I was asked to go home and wait for a summon to come for image capture.  It was probably the fifth extension, and I’m sure, there are many more to go before I get that licence.

The subtle message is clear to me:  Bribe an official and and cut out all this endless stress of taking time off work, driving all the way to FRSC Ojodu, wasting more precious time looking for where to park your car, wasting even more time sitting in a crowded canopy and enduring indignities from uncouth civil servants, and having to go back empty-handed at the end of it all.  I’m just intentionally ignoring the message. I don’t know for how long I will be able to ignore the message, though.

There is some form of order in the process these days, compared to what used to be. There is a clear procedure now. Nobody bothers to explain it to you, but in my experience, it moves along smoothly enough, until after all the tests and it remains image capture, the final hurdle.

The officials haven’t changed much though. The elderly, irreverent and uncouth civil servant types are still aplenty, such as the dreaded sharp-tongued woman in Room 5. She is something of an insult goddess, worshipped by her own colleagues and feared by applicants. She treats applicants with the contempt usually reserved for kitchen pests.

Those who want to avoid these indignities would prefer to induce an official to fast-track the process.

If Nigeria is serious about cutting official corruption, it is not hard to figure out what needs to be done.  Look into the processes and make them work. Fish out those who deliberately prevent the processes from working in order to extort the public.

If an application is made, there should be a maximum number of days that application should stay on any official’s table before it is moved along. One year for a licence renewal is unacceptable!

The idea of death penalty for corrupt public official in my humble opinion is silly. How much seriousness have we applied to implementing existing law? If you have not effectively utilized what is existing, how can you complain it is ineffective? Is it when you cannot muster the courage and necessary sincerity to commit a thieving governor to jail that you will now find the courage to kill him? I get pissed off with this tendency for Nigerians to grand-stand and romance highfallutin ideas, when we lack the basic honesty to implement simple, practical measures to achieve the desired results.

Get a leader that is sincere to wipe out corruption in this country today and without changing a thing in our laws will cut official corruption by more than half overnight.

It is not rocket science. Neither is it brain surgery. Nobody wants to go to jail. But people will steal public money when they know they can pull a few strings to avoid going to jail. There only needs to be a leader with a strong determination and the COURAGE to stop that and there will be a positive change.

Confessions of a US traffic cop, lessons for LASTMA

 

Nigerian police officers, LASTMA officials, FRSC men and others involved in road safety and traffic law enforcement have a lot to learn from this American police officer, especially in the area of use of discretion and responsible traffic law enforcement.

Mike Brucks retired from the El Paso Police Department as a traffic cop last May after 22 years and almost 40,000 tickets, by his estimation. He was featured by Yahoo!

 Here are some of his stories from the road and tips for motorists looking to avoid a ticket.

Besides speeding, which is the reason for most tickets, what's most likely to get a traffic cop's attention?

 

Seatbelts, cell phones, red lights, and stop signs. I concentrate on all the things that can cause an accident. There are some cops who write tickets for expired plates, for having no insurance or registration, but you're not going to crash because of any of that. I focused on safety issues—that's what I like to do.

 

Do traffic cops think it's cheating to hide behind billboards?

 

No. You've got a radar detector; you know where we hide. If you are thinking we are hiding somewhere, it's because you're speeding.

 

Do you have favourite hiding places?

 

I stay on the freeway mostly. That's where there are more speeders. I'll park under overpasses, on bridges. I need to be able to start the bike and accelerate to go after someone. If there are a lot of exits, I can miss [a speeder] who can maybe get off at an exit, and then it's too late to catch him.

 

How much leeway do you give someone before writing them a speeding ticket?

 

The speed limit in Texas used to be 60 mph, [and] well, out on the clear road where there's a lot of visibility I give people leeway. I wouldn't write tickets until they got to 80 mph. I've never worked an area where the speed limit drops a lot without warning, what I call a trap. If there's a new speed limit that's lower, it [takes] time for people to get used to it and I don't write tickets there.

 

What can a driver say to get out of a ticket?

 

When someone tells me that a family member has just been sent to the hospital and they're on their way, how can I ticket them for that? I tell them that they're not being safe, that they need to slow down and stay safe. That's about it.

 

I think now it's much more of a rat-race world than it was 30 years ago. The workforce has generated that. People have to be at work on time or risk getting fired, kids have to be picked up and taken places—it's just citizens in a hurry. Ninety-eight percent of the people I stop are law-abiding good citizens, and they say they have no reason to speed. That's an easy ticket. They're not happy, but I could go months without any problems, without anyone cussing me out. I wrote a lot of warnings, too, but it all depends on the situation, if they were being safe.

Are speed limits too low?

 

No, the traffic engineers, at least in Texas, are pretty good. It's not that some parts of the highway are safer for speeding, it's that drivers aren't always paying attention. People die on lonely deserted stretches of road too. There are a lot of times drivers aren't concentrating. They need to understand you're going 100 feet per second on the highway. Above 75 mph things just happen so fast, [whether it's] a flat tire, a coyote, wind, dirt, or rocks. It's not that much better now that cars are safer; reaction times are still the same.

 

What's the toughest ticket you've had to write?

 

I clocked a woman coming down from New Mexico on Highway 54 at 111 mph. She had just been stopped for going 90 mph 15 minutes [earlier] in New Mexico. Everybody has a reason, and I want to know it. I always ask why someone was speeding, and that's just to open things up. I want to know what they're thinking, if they need my help for something. She had been crying, and the tears didn't just start—they'd been going on a long time, you can tell. She was on her way to a motel in El Paso to catch her husband who was shacked up with another woman there, cheating. How do you write a ticket for that?

 

Who's the craziest speeder you've seen?

 

I stopped a guy going 136 mph. I caught him mostly because he thought he lost me. I came up beside him and blocked his front wheel on the curb. The hardest part after that was now I have to be courteous and respectful, although he could have killed someone, and that makes me angry. It's really too bad, he was a good kid, never been in trouble, but now he had to go to jail for felonious evading, and that's really going to wreck his life.

 

When do you not chase a speeder?

 

I clocked a guy on a crotch-rocket bike doing 189 mph. Just let him go. Since police departments began to get sued for chasing speeders, around 1995, there's a fine line. You have to determine if you can catch him, if chasing him will cause an accident for him, for you, for the public. There's no way to catch anyone like that. ..

FRSC to issue commercial drivers licence

Osita Chidoka, Corps Marshal, FRSC

For those who drive to make a living, one more thing to worry about. A new licence just for you is in the making. As from December 3, you will have to get it to escape the wrath of f FRSC.

And for those in Lagos, having this new licence does not save you from the wrath of LASTMA o! You must also get your your LASDRI certification.

Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) said its commercial drivers licence will be launched nationwide on December 3, 2012.

The Kaduna State Sector Commander, Olumide Michael Olagunju, disclosed this yesterday during a stakeholders’ forum in Kaduna.

According to him, the need to issue commercial drivers licence has become imperative following the rate of road crashes, some of which he said were as a result of unqualified commercial drivers who ply the roads. 

Olagunju said that for any driver to be issued the licence, he would have been made to go through medical certification to include, in particular, visual test and mental balance, among others, to ensure that the driver was medically fit to drive.

He warned, however, that upon the formal launching of the commercial drivers licence, any commercial driver who fails to get the licence would be sanctioned appropriately.