The Federal Road Safety Commission, FRSC, has come a long way from its humble beginning as a child of circumstance.
Thanks to a visionary leadership, the commission today has become the leading institution in road safety management on the continent and one of the most resourceful global players.
As a responsive institution, the FRSC was the first law enforcement organisation in Nigeria to be certified ISO 9001 and the fourth of its kind in the world.
An organization that started with a nucleus staff of about 20 today has emerged the continental template and model for road safety operations in Africa.
Tributes must certainly be paid to the commission’s crop of leaders since inception for their clarity of vision in sustaining the corporate essence of the FRSC.
Instructively, the tradition of steadfast sustenance of the FRSC mandate may well be responsible for the milestones recorded in the ardous task of checking carnages on the nation’s highways.
Road Safety Officers
Chief Executive and Corps Marshal, of the FRSC, Boboye Oyeyemi, readily typifies the young Turks that are stamping their imprimatur on the institutions they run in order to make that remarkable difference in public service.
Deploying remarkable cutting edge technology to road safety management, Oyeyemi would certainly go down in FRSC records as one who forever changed the face of the corps for goods.
Only recently, Oyeyemi told Time Nigeria that with the collaboration of the World Bank some members of the corps were billed to go to Sierra Leone on secondment for two years with the aim to setting up the Road Safety Corps in that country.
Although the Ebola outbreak in that country delayed the assignment, it certainly remains work-in- progress in the face of the bid by other countries seeking Nigeria’s help in setting up road safety management institutions.
While it reaches out to other sister countries, the FRSC is not unmindful of its domestic mandate of ensuring safer roads.
At the heart of its campaign for safer roads is an awesome sensitisation campaign involving all tools of the media at considerable cost.
According to the FRSC boss, “even though it is expensive, the corps has been able to raise the level of awareness on drive to stay alive.
“It used to be drive to stay alive before but with the latest global slogan it is now ‘drive to save a life.’’
Road Safety Officers during the World Day of remembrance for Road Traffic Crash Victims.
Boasting a work force of about 23,000 with about 254 missions, 200 Drivers License centres for number plates, 23 roadside clinics and 26 ambulances all over the country, Oyeyemi drives the corps to the limit of its capacity in cutting down the figures for casualities on the highways.
To ensure that road safety remains paramount and that defaulters are prosecuted accordingly, the Corps Marshal said the FRSC had last year taken delivery of evidence based radar guns, evidence paid accolisers while cameras have been mounted.
All these have been achieved with the global institution, the World Bank.
Interestingly, the commission has also introduced the novel mailing of tickets to offenders.
“We have directed the Field Commands that patrol teams must never pursue offenders. So the essence is this, you get an offender, you flag him down to stop and he did not stop, the next thing is to get the details, enquire from the data base and mail the ticket and if he did not report, after you get a warrant of arrest,’’ he had said.
Even more interesting is the introduction of the speed limiting device which is about to be to be enforced in the country.
This regime, according to the corps marshall, would reduce the rate of accidents on Nigerian roads to a barest minimum.
On its implementation, he says: “We are looking at the need to ensure it is not for all comers to come into the business of the limiting device so that the fake ones are not brought in.
“…the control must be there, the checks and balances, and these things are calibrated. When you install the device you go for calibration every year. They must be calibrated periodically.”
Another milestone the corps has been able to attain is in the issuance of Drivers Licence. Ordinarily it usually takes up to 60 days to get the permanent drivers licence but the corps with the establishment of the state-of –the-art drivers licence production firm, the bottleneck in the process has been reduced to 45.
With the firm producing 700 licences daily, the issuance days may further be reduced as capacity increases.
A man with commanding presence of mind, Oyeyemi envisions that in the not too distant future, the FRSC would be saving more lives and reducing fatalities more than the UN Decade of Action on Road Safety even pronounced.