Extortion of members of the public under the guise of law enforcement has for years served as a covert strategy by which officials of certain societal institutions in Nigeria enhance their own take-home pay. It is irrelevant that such enhancements are illegal. What is important is that all over Nigeria, vehicle owners and commercial drivers are coerced to pay different fines for undisclosed traffic offences to sundry law enforcement agencies. Incidentally, such payments are hardly ever remitted to the public treasury. The implication of the trend is that it encourages the victims to resort to sharp practices in whatever they do which in turn exacerbate the rising cost of living in society.
Following agitations by members of the public against such illegal collections, a fundamental rights activist and public interest attorney, Abubakar Marshal, filed an enforcement to compel the Directorate of Road Traffic Services more generally known as the Vehicle Inspection Office (VIO) from continuing with the illegal practice. On October 16, 2024, a federal high court presided over by Justice Evelyn Nkeonye Maha made a significant ruling prohibiting VIO officials from stopping, impounding, confiscating, seizing, or imposing fines on motorists because their agency was not legally empowered to so act.
Dissatisfied with Justice Maha’s judgment, the VIO proceeded on appeal. Just four days ago, a three-member panel of the Court of Appeal held that there was no basis to overturn the Federal High Court’s ruling of October 16, 2024, which prohibited VIO officials from harassing motorists. The major plank of justice which the Judiciary established in the case was that the conduct of the VIOs violated motorists’ fundamental rights—including the right to freedom of movement, the presumption of innocence, and the right to own property without unlawful interference. Of course, what is the essence of constitutionally backed fundamental rights that are often overwhelmed by subsidiary legislations?
As far as this case is concerned the judiciary has done well with no room created here for some people to malign our judges. To start with, the handling of the case was swift. The first court concluded its proceedings and made a ruling in October 2024. The second court heard the appeal and delivered judgment in about one year. Again, unlike political cases where the litigants are often engaged in circumlocution within courts of coordinate jurisdiction, this was a case in which the Court of Appeal promptly endorsed the persuasive decision of a lower court. Under the circumstance, society’s clear path has been shown by the judiciary to mean that there is need for sanity on Nigerian roads.
It is therefore time for Nigerians to end the debate as to the desirability of law enforcement on our roads which do not only impoverish our people, but also make our roads unduly rowdy and permanently congested. Apart from the fact that roads are not built for activities but essentially for ease of movement, VIOs are mere administrative officers and employees of a Transportation Ministry who have no professional competence in law enforcement. At best, they only operate as revenue collectors which is not the mandate of their Ministry. If so, how did revenue generation become part of their work? To make matters worse, the revenue they collect are misappropriated as they are not paid into government coffers thereby expanding the scope of corruption in Nigeria.
As a nation, we need to dissuade the practice of changing the mandate of an agency because of revenue generation. In different parts of the country what new data reflects is a huge correlation between the extent of VIO activities and mounting public frustration. Painfully, many of the actors are not even VIOs but are merely regarded as such by virtue of the similarities in the modus operandi of most law enforcement officials. The number of vehicles impounded by different types of VIOs is just too large to be ignored. According to Gazettengr.com, over 9,389 vehicles were impounded in Abuja within eight months. In Kano, the Sunday PUNCH at a point found the impoundments to have generated about N33.2m in fines, thereby raising questions about whether the enforcement efforts are truly driven by safety concerns or financial gains.
It is against this backdrop that we disagree with the argument in Lagos that the ruling of the judiciary on the powers of the VIOs concerns only Abuja simply because the case was instituted in Abuja. We believe it should concern the entire country and that those who have regulations in their states which validate VIO extortions must remember that their regulations are inferior to the constitution which guarantees freedom of movement to all Nigerians as well as freedom to own property without unlawful interference. What is more, that many motorists are unruly does not confer on administrative bodies, the power to punish offences through the imposition of fines; that is a function that should be exercised judicially.
Lagos, should in fact, learn from the development because that is one of the Nigerian locations that is habitually congested irrespective of law enforcement efforts. There is indeed, a viewpoint that law enforcement is a catalyst to congestion in Lagos. This is more obvious when it is realized that many trucks blocking places like Apapa are allowed to operate by so-called law enforcement agents who had received bribes from users. We should also not forget too soon that Governor Akin Ambode dissolved the Lagos VIO in 2017 because of their behaviour. At the time, the Vehicle Inspection Officers were asked to stay off our roads permanently while the Federal Road Safety Corps were advised to stay on the fringes and highways and not on the main streets of Lagos.
Two years before Lagos, Kaduna had chosen to hold the Bull by the horn when it cancelled the VIO as an institution. The then Governor of the State, Malam Nasir El Rufai immediately signed an Executive Order for the VIO personnel to promptly withdraw from the streets adding that anyone found on Kaduna streets purporting to be a VIO from Tuesday, 8 December 2015, would be treated as an impostor and would be arrested by the Police for immediate prosecution for impersonation. Government insisted that following complaints from members of the public and the security agencies regarding widespread indiscipline, misconduct, alleged extortion and disrespect to citizens by VIO personnel, it came to the conclusion that the VIOs as then constituted could not serve the public interest.
If as far back as 10 years ago, at least two states, Kaduna and Lagos had come to the conclusion that VIOs had become a disservice, it was wrong for governments to have allowed the bodies to operate without clear reforms. It was also wrong that they were allowed to operate on the roads thereby becoming inimical to freedom of movement. In the first place, the collection of cash revenues by any person, authority or organization was prohibited because state laws required that all payments were to be made to the government through a bank or via electronic channels. Yet, rascals were allowed to openly extort members of the public.
In addition, it is unlawful for any individual or group under any name to take laws into their hands and block any Road or Highway in full or any part of it under the guise of collection of Revenue/Tax or enforcement of any interests. It was apparently for this reason that the Taxes and Levies act, Laws of Federation of Nigeria 2004 at section 2 (2) disallowed any person, including a Tax Authority from mounting a road block in any part of the Federation for the purposes of collecting any Tax or Levy. Between then and now, we see road blocks daily and do nothing about them to the chagrin of the average citizen. Efforts in 2017 by the Police under the leadership of IGP Ibrahim Idris who deployed Special X-Squad Teams of the Force across the country to remove all forms of illegal blockage on Highways and other obstructions created unlawfully by some unscrupulous officials were short lived
There is no reason why Nigeria cannot end the trend of several persons in different uniforms extorting money from motorists and other citizens across the nation. Even on the highways, we found long ago that the activities of the extortionists are part of high food prices in the country. According to a former Minister of Agriculture, Chief Audu Ogbe, high costs of food stuffs were caused by producers adding all the tolls collected from them on the roads to their cost of production. Agencies that are really willing to clear our roads of hinderances can do so with ease if they employ technology to track and monitor vehicle registration and movements. If insurgency is too hard to stop, minor nuisances such as extortions on our roads should to be stopped forthwith especially now that our courts have said so.
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