Government should stop the brazen extortion in renewing driving license because it is totally uncalled for: once a driver, person remains a driver and has no need for renewing driving licence which presupposes re-retaining. It is lamentable that the present leadership of the FRSC did not wean itself from the naïve and mischievous mind set that characterized its past leadership whose stock-in-trade had been to come with grotesque proposals and sneak into Aso Rock Villa to crawl before President Goodluck Jonathan to secure his blessings to go ahead with ‘creative and resourceful’ but crazy proposals which inflicted privations on motorists.
Nigerians want the APC-led federal government to demonstrate a Spartan will to reinvent ideal governance by restructuring the country to drastically reduce over-centralization of MDAs so as to diversify the comatose economy and enable the constituent polities to regain their areas of legislation, policies and projects which they lost due to the over-centralization done by the military regimes. It is crystal clear that there could not have been APC-federal government without the political sagacity and formidable financial war machine of the former Lagos state governor, Alhaji Ahmmed Tinubu. The “Lion of Boudillion and Jagaban” Kwara state never relented in his avowal for restructuring of the lopsided Nigeria to reinvent the inviolate principles of Federal system of government which were brazenly truncated by the aberrant military regimes and sustained by shameless civilian government apologists.
Inherent in the envisaged restructuring of the country as a step to True Federalism is decentralization of the MDAs with the review of the lopsided revenue allocation which made the federal government to ware-house quantum funds that have been the root cause of mindless financial sleaze in the executive and legislative arms of government. Most of the federal laws that prohibit sub-national governments from exploring and exploiting the natural and mineral resources within their territory should be amended. The shenanigan of the minister of solid minerals in ‘advising’ state governments to exploit the mineral resources within their domain without first amending the federal laws is to maintain the covert agenda sequel to the feudalization of the polity since the demise of the first republic.
The APC-led federal government must not be seen as a one-man show in which President Muhammadu Buhari will be acting as an autocrat and shun the recommendations of the 2014 National Conference which all Nigerians participated and agreed that the pseudo federalism which the aberrant military clamped on the country has dragged it back-wards.
In reality, nobody is advocating an automatic going back to the status of the country as it was in the first republic with four regions- northern region, eastern region, mid-western region and western region. Rather, the will to realize that the only panacea to reverse the down-ward trajectory of the corporate fortunes of the country is to implement and reinvent the deliberately abandoned sacred and sacrosanct principles of federal system of government as practiced the world-over.
For instance in terms of security of lives and property, the deliberate failure of the police and the army to disarm the supposed Fulani herdsmen along with their foreign allies has proven that Nigeria is a failed state since the primary duty of government the world-over is security.
In Nigeria people who want to make use of guns must obtain license but recently Fulani herdsmen move about with guns without license and use them to invade Christian states in the middle-belt and southern parts of the country committing ferocious atrocities and bare-faced terrorism with AK-47 and sundry dangerous weapons. The clear message is that the country has to be restructured for the component units to have their own security apparatus and criminal justice system.
The blood-hounds are not relenting since they have seen that the police and the army are their allies.
The APC-led federal government should as a matter of national emergency put measures in place to restructure the country to maintain “One Nigeria”. One of the first steps is to disband the FRSC and merge it with the police which will in turn be decentralized for state police. It is plain naivety for the leadership of the FRSC to frolic with the idea of raising the already conscienceless and over-bearing cost of driving license and vehicle number plates. The FRSC via Act 141 Laws of the Federation 1990 was established to complement the police in traffic management and never to be a revenue agent of the federal and state governments.
President Olusegun Obasanjo on 18th February 2000, merged the FRSC with the police. Sadly, the “Nigerian factor” led to court action even as some newspapers were influenced by the former leadership of the FRSC and they wrote flowering editorials on the ‘wonderful’ performance of the FRSC. It was the PUNCH newspaper that supported President Obasanjo when it wrote inter-alia In its editorial: “The FRSC’s plan to roll out new drivers’ licenses and vehicle number plates may impose undue hardship on motorists…it entrenches centralization in violation of Nigeria’s status as a federation, where ideally, issuance of licenses should be left to the states…,the FRSC should therefore return to its glorious early days when its patrols, disciplined officials and volunteer reduced the carnage through professionalism and zero tolerance for corruption and extortion…Enough is enough for monstrous waste in the name federal government while the reality on ground is a Unitary Government in Nigeria”.
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