“ROAD SAFETY AND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT”
TEXT OF A PAPER PRESENTED BY OSITA CHIDOKA CORPS MARSHAL AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF THE FEDERAL ROAD SAFETY CORPS (FRSC) AT THE 2009 PRESS WEEK OF NUJ ABUJA COUNCIL HELD AT TRANSCORP HILTON HOTEL ABUJA ON THURSDAY 10 DECEMBER 2009

INTRODUCTION

Within the framework of non-conventional security strategy which informed the setting up of the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) by the Federal Government of Nigeria in February 1988, as a lead agency for road traffic management and administration, there is the need to assess the contribution of road safety to the national development efforts. I will therefore attempt to look at the challenges of road safety, the role of FRSC, its management and administration and the contributions of road safey to the attainment of the national development goals.

Defining values of the state
 
According to Max Webber (1946), state is “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. And to build it, according to Fukuyama (2004:IX) means creating a new government and strengthening the existing ones. It has been stressed that national development or state building is one of the important issues for the world community, because weak and failed states are the sources of the world’s most serious problems, ranging from poverty to AIDS, drugs to terrorism and in our own case, pervasive road traffic crashes.

To create a prosperous, safe and secured nation therefore becomes the legitimate concern of all its citizens, who must work harmoniously towards this realization. That is why the theme of this year’s press week, “Reforming for a safe, secured nation” is both apt and timely. I therefore, wish to commend the organizers for this thoughtfulness and thank Abuja council of NUJ for this platform.

The Nigerian state is the inheritor of the British subjugation of diverse peoples that existed in the area before the British colonial penetration. And though its sovereignty has been tested at various times such as during the Nigerian civil war, coups and militant uprisings, it has been resolved in favour of the Nigerian state and its sovereignty endures.

The challenge before all the compatriots therefore, has been how to transform Nigeria from a mere state to a nation. The World Bank report (2000:50) stressed that for a state to be functional, it must possess the following characteristics at the institutional level:
(a)    Capacity to maintain nationwide peace, law and order, without which other government functions are compromised or impossible;
(b)    Must ensure individual liberty and equality before the law;
(c)    Needs workable checks and balances on the arbitrary exercise of power, in order to make public decisions transparent and predicable;
(d)    Must also ensure that free press and public watchdog organizations guide against abuse of power and reinforce checks and balances and effective service delivery.

All these characteristics must however not be fully present for development to occur, as there are concrete realities and peculiarities that must be taken into account.

The metamorphosis of Nigeria to a functional state is the goal of the present administration of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, whose trajectory of administration can be discerned from its avowed commitment to the sanctity of a rule driven state tethered to the foundation of social justice and consensual approach to wealth creation and diffusion. These values were aggregated in its 7 point agenda and the nation’s vision 2020:20.

The elevation of rule keeping to a national mantra by the administration is the visible manifestation of its desire to create a predictable and transparent governance process that derives its essence from the institutive quest to build state capacity, increase social capital and restore trust between the state and its citizens. Herein lies the congruence between the development focus of the administration and the activities of the Federal Road Safety Corps, whose presence on the nation’s roads gives the citizenry assurances of their safety and reinforces their national identity through its driver’s license scheme.

Road traffic crashes have been identified globally as a limitation to national development efforts. This is because the victims are mostly young, productive and energetic members of the population who get killed with all the knowledge and expertise they have acquired to enhance national productivity. It has also been emphasized that, countries most vulnerable to road traffic crashes are those of the low and middle income countries who currently lose in the region of $100 billion every year. This is almost twice as much as the total development assistance received worldwide by developing countries. These losses undoubtedly inhibit the economic and social development of developing countries like our own.

The proactive action taken by Nigeria in 1988 through the instrumentality of the Federal Road Safety Corps is therefore a commendable national initiative meant to deal with the menace of road crashes and enhancing the nation’s development profile.

Since its creation therefore, the Commission has taken far reaching decisions to justify the national confidence reposed in it. Starting from the institution of public enlightenment programmes to deal with the apathy of road users through patrol and rescue strategies, to the reforms in the licensing system and even the involvement of non-uniformed members into its enforcement group, to the ongoing ICT focused administrative system, there can be no doubt that the contributions of the Federal Road Safety Corps to national development efforts are self evident.

But as characteristic of all institutional development, the past attempts to restore sanity on our roads have been bedeviled with critical challenges, some of which are currently being addressed under our strategy of policy, people and technology (PPT).

When I assumed office in June 2007, I discovered that the Corps had only 170 patrol vehicles to cover the nation’s 198,000km of road network, which at peak performance could only cover 12.5% of it. The offenders’ registers were manually kept; staff strength stood at 20,000, which was made up of 12,000 Regular and 8,000 Special Marshals and there was absence of ICT back-up to properly coordinate field operations and rescue services.

The national drivers licence which was launched in 1990 with fanfare and had undergone various reforms, despite its national acceptance became entrapped in corruption, as parallel production centres and fake licences sprang up across the country. Consequently, of the twelve million driver’s licences in circulation as at 2007, only two million of them had their holders’ correct records properly captured in our database. Additionally, the morale of staff was at the lowest ebb because of the uncertainty in their career development as occasioned by lack of promotion, training and conversion for qualified Marshals. Furthermore, there was inadequate welfare package to address their numerous welfare needs. All these resulted in low productivity and loss of focus.

Our Response to the Challenges

To refocus the Corps and realign its operations with the new national development agenda, we embarked on aggressive public sensitization programmes and advocacy role to the government and our stakeholders in the private sector. These efforts led to increment in our capital budgetary allocation by the Federal Government in 2008. And this was complemented by enhanced stakeholders’ support to the Corps.

Consequently, we were able to in 2008 inject 180 new patrol vehicles, 22 ambulances, 3 heavy duty tow trucks, 150 motorbikes and refurbished over 200 broken down vehicles from the 1million Naira zonal quarterly allocation released to the zonal commands. We followed this up with the commissioning of the Call/Data Centre to facilitate our field operations, rescue activities and online verification of the driver’s licenses. Equally, 45 V-sat were deployed to field commands and 1000 telephone lines under the close users group (CUG) were incorporated into the system at the National Headquarters. All these resulted in improvement to our response time to emergencies which was about 50minutes to 1hour in 2007 which has now come down to 20-30 minutes currently, while our road coverage level rose to 41%.

With the poor regulation of operations of road transport subsector, which created negative impact on road safety in the country, we launched the road transport safety standardization scheme (RTSSS) in September, 2007 to ensure registration, training and standards in fleet operation. The scheme makes it mandatory for the appointment of safety manager by any transport company operating with more than 5 vehicles. The registration of transport companies and creation of database/certification is ongoing, while training of safety managers and operators across the country was recently completed.

In line with the need to ensure that the global best practices in road safety management and administration were observed in the Corps, we embarked on the documentation of the Corps’ processes toward our attainment of ISO 9001 certification. In furtherance to this, about 67 of our staff have already successfully completed quality management course which qualified them for ISO certified internal system auditors. And in recognition of our contributions to international standard systems, the Corps through the Standards Organization of Nigeria (SON) made inputs into the new International Standards on road traffic safety management system (ISO 39001).

Conscious of the need to ensure efficient welfare package for our staff and in line with the desire to retain the best hands in the organization, we instituted a welfare system that addresses not only the questions of regular payment of salaries, but that which provides opportunity of property ownership and easy access to loanable funds for staff.

Consequently, from the existing staff cooperative scheme, we established a Micro Finance Bank (SAFELINE) and secured an operating license from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). In the same vein, we completed and commissioned 100 units of semi-detached 2bedroom and 86 units of semi-detached flats for junior and middle cadre officers at Masaka. The estate was named after the First Chairman of FRSC Board, Professor Wole Soyinka. The Lokogoma estate, which consists of 356 housing unit is currently under construction and at advanced stage of completion.

With the ECOWAS Protocol on free movement of its citizens within the sub-region and the need for a platform to harmonize road traffic matters and standardize operational procedures the setting up of the West African Road Safety Organization (WARSO) became imperative. Nigeria’s FRSC thus facilitated the inauguration of the organization in May 2008 at the ECOWAS Secretariat, Abuja. I was unanimously elected by members as the Pioneer President of the Organization and have successfully utilized the platform to raise the banner of public awareness on road safety not only within the West African sub-region, but at the international level.

International Recognition:

In recognition of the qualitative leadership and outstanding contributions made by FRSC in creating public awareness in road safety matters, the prestigious Prince Michael International Road Safety Award Safety was won by the Commission in 2008. The Award was presented to me in December 2008 by HRH Prince Michael of Kent, who is the Patron of the Global Commission for Road Safety, in an elaborate ceremony held at the Parklane Hotel, London and witnessed by the Nigerian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Dr. Dalhatu Sarki Tafida among other international road safety stakeholders.

 

The subject of development is one of the persistent myths of the second half of the twentieth century. There had been divergent views on its meaning. For instance, according to Rivero (2000:109), before the appearance of development theories, poor countries that had not experimented the capitalist industrial evolution were called “backward countries”. This changed to “underdeveloped countries” in 1950s when development theories began to be discussed. Sometimes, later in 1960, it was again altered to “countries undergoing development” and later adjusted to “developing countries”. The consensus among scholars however, is that for development to be said to be taking place, questions of unemployment, inequality and poverty must be addressed by the government.

Nigeria is one of the developing countries of the world that is evidently suffering from the crisis of underdevelopment as can be discerned from the level of poverty, unemployment and growing inequality between the rich and the poor. There is disarticulation between the urban and rural dwellers and collapse in our educational system, which heightens illiteracy and militancy among the youths.

The 2008 report of the Africa Peer Review Mechanism stated that “Nigeria’s GDP per capita is only about $752, and poverty is widespread with 54 percent of the population living below $1 per day”. It went further to state that “the country’s Human Development Index (HDI) at 0.453 in 2005 is lower than the average HDI for sub-Saharan Africa (0.515), although it is slightly above the average for ECOWAS countries (0.434)”.

These stark realities of our underdevelopment, made it imperative for President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s administration to pursue a vision for development predicated on the nation’s plans to attain the position of the twenty largest economy in the world by the year 2020. But for this to succeed, we all have a role to play towards its realization, just like the Asian tigers did in their countries some years back.

Our Activities in Brief

Based on our realization that no nation develops under an atmosphere of road insecurity and chaos, we re-strategized our operations towards the attainment of the national development agenda. It is estimated that with the current level of motorization in the country, traffic volume would rise up to 40 million vehicles on the nation’s roads by 2020. What this means is that, we have to plan and work ahead of time to remove any obstacle that could jeopardize the attainment of this visioning. That is why FRSC has adopted ICT in its operational and administrative system, aimed at optimizing the human and material resources at its disposal.

To this end, we have increased our collaboration with relevant stakeholders and heightened the tempo of advocacy to make the responsibility of road safety a collective one that it is. Our relationship with the Joint Tax Board (JTB) in dealing with the challenges of the National Uniform Licensing Scheme has become more robust. We have increased the number of Special Marshals from 8,000 that I met in 2007 to about 15,000 presently, and plan is on to increase the strength, while most of the State Governors have been inaugurated as patrons of special marshals in their respective states. I have also led advocacy visits to members of the Executive and legislative arms of the government for them to appreciate the enormity of road safety challenges in the country. And importantly, we have engaged the youths at Primary, Secondary and NYSC levels and made them active participants in road safety matters through our Road Safety Club initiative.

Realizing that poor driver training contributes significantly to the low driving culture in the country, we have published the Nigeria Highway Code and put in place Driving School Standardization Programme (DSSP). Through this initiative, standards for driving schools in the country has been set and those that were unable to meet the standards would not be allowed to operate as driving schools, while those that met the standards are being certified across the country.

In the same vein, we have enunciated a policy that makes it compulsory for new applicants for driver’s licence to be sponsored only by the recognized driving schools. This policy will become effective from next year. And under our customized driver’s license scheme, we have eliminated scanning process. Instead, only the licences of holders who appear physically and their biometrics are captured by our machines are accepted as genuine. The online verification facilities at our data centre will help to address issues of double acquisition of the licences, whereas, our patrol men will from next year operate with hand-held devices that could instantly question and detect the validity of any driver’s license presented to them. EFCC, Banks and the Nigerian embassies are among the collaborators in this initiative.

It is hoped that with the success in our licensing system and the ongoing electronic update of our offenders’ registers, we will be in a position to provide information on all offenders to the relevant government agencies. This realization alone by the offenders will serve as enough restraint and sanction that would guide against committing traffic offences and ultimately bringing sanity to our roads.

We have in our desire to ensure vehicle safety standards, created a new department responsible for handling issues of vehicle safety standards and road engineering. This area had not been properly exploited in the past, but with this development, the questions of vehicle standards for the country and road engineering which significantly contribute to the flaws in our road safety planning in the past are now being adequately addressed.

In our attempt to deal with the apathy of victims of road traffic crashes who suffered untold hardship due to lack of immediate response whenever crashes occur, we have established more accident clinics at black spots across the country and increased the number of our unit commands to address the traffic challenges in the areas. Recently, the first lady commissioned our Pilot Ambulance Scheme for FCT; it is expected that we will replicate the same facilities in all the states of the Federation.

With the Ambulance Scheme in place and backed with effective patrol and enforcement and the road traffic accident clinics and help areas that are being setup across the major highways with effective coordination of field operations by the call centre at the National Headquarters, we have no doubt that Nigeria will sustain the image of a responsible nation, whose government cares for the safety of its citizens on the road.

Mr Chairman, Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, it is the collective responsibility of every Nigerian to make the nation’s planned attainment of vision 2020 realizable. And as I have stated before, the nation’s ability to attain this vision is hinged on our ability to ensure safety of lives and property on the nation’s highways in order to save the productive segment of the population from destruction. It therefore behooves on all Nigerians to join hands with FRSC as the lead agency in road traffic safety administration and management in the country to contribute their individual and collective quota towards making our roads safer.

As we celebrate this year’s Christmas and New Year therefore, I once again call on all Nigerians to say “No” to road carnage; let us collectively demystify road crashes and make our families observe this year’s festival under an atmosphere of sincere happiness and that which is devoid of reports of perennial road traffic crashes.

Conclusion

In concluding this address, let me reiterate that we are resolute in positively changing the fortunes of the Federal Road Safety Corps through a reform process that optimizes the human and material resources available and make Nigerian roads crash-free. We will strive to unfurl the banner of service to nation above self.

But to accomplish these objectives, I call on all Nigerians particularly, those of you in the media to rally round the commission and render the necessary support to make the ongoing reforms in the Corps a success. The chaos and apathy that characterize our road usage are not insurmountable; road safety is no accident. With your support, our philosophy of “life over mobility” would be sustained and the nation can experience safety on its roads and advance strongly towards its attainment of vision 2020 target and national development goals.

Thank you for your attention and God bless.