By Francis H. Murray
The union representing commercial motor bike riders, known as Okada, have accused traffic police officers of illegally converting bikes they impound into personal property.
The Sierra Leone Bike Riders Union said police officers illegally take ownership of the bikes when they arrest their owners for minor traffic offences, detain them, only to release them when their bikes will have been done away with in fraudulent auction processes.
Union representatives made the allegation during a meeting with authorities from the Sierra Leone Road Safety Authority (SLRSA) and the Sierra Leone Police. The meeting was convened by the rights campaign group, Center for Accountability and Rule of Law (CARL).
CARL said the meeting was necessitated by recurrent complaints by the bike riders union about the experience of its members and appealing for their intervention.
Nellie Smith Conteh, National Chairlady of the Bike Riders Union, explained that traffic police officers auction off the bikes among themselves, only to put the bikes on the roads to work for them. She told the stakeholders meeting convened at the offices of SLRSA that even though the riders are arrested for riding in prohibited parts of the city, when the police illegally acquire these bikes they hand them to riders of their own who ply the same prohibited routes.
Okada is one of the most popular forms of public transport in a country where transportation is major hurdle for majority of the population. But the bike riders are constantly in trouble with the police. While the police say they always violate traffic rules, the riders say they don’t have to break any rule to get booked by the police, whom they accuse of extortion.
About three years ago the police identified several parts of Freetown’s city center where they prohibited bikes from plying. But even with the ban bikes still ply these routes.
The riders say they are able to ride through these routes by bribing corrupt traffic police officers who turn blind eye to them. Those who fail to bribe, they allege, are the ones that are arrested.
According to the Sierra Leone Police, their regulations dictate that when a bike is arrested it is auctioned through the courts system.
But the bike riders union say the police don’t conduct the auction publicly, and that they do so in closed door, so that they sell the bikes among themselves.
“These bikes are arrested, auctioned and bought by the police. So I don’t call it action, but stealing,” Ms Conteh said at the meeting on Thursday, August 13th, in the presence of the SLRSA’s management.
“When the Sierra Leone Roads Safety Authority is ready to auction vehicles for example, they put the vehicles on newspapers, gazette them and pass through a court order before ever they’re auctioned. But this is not the same with the police. You don’t even see it in either newspapers or any gazette,’’ she lamented.
Conteh added that the police randomly arrest the motorbikes and keep them for a while before they put them back on the roads with changed registration numbers to be run by the same Okada boys, under the protection of the police.
She added that when such bikes are arrested by the SLRSA Traffic Wardens, the boys only make calls to the police officers and the bikes are released.
The Union also expressed concern about the manner of arrests and the illegal detention bike riders are subjected to for “minor traffic offences” which could be settled without detention.
CARL said they took up the matter under an ongoing project designed to decriminalize poverty. Fanbundeh Ansumana, Coordinator of the Project, said that a joint research conducted in 2017 by CARL and AdvoAid revealed that 33% of the cases in court are mostly petty offences, noting that such cases had human rights implications, with a huge effect on the functions of the judiciary.
“On minor offenses, in our findings we realized that motorbikes commit offenses but they’re minor offenses with punishment that are so huge and not commensurate to the offences committed,” Ansumana said at the meeting.
The activist added that this has contributed to poverty on the riders who are self-employed and have families relying on them.
The meeting at SLRSA, according to Ansumana, was meant to find ways to minimize the punishment for bike riders as well as drivers for petty offenses, in order to conform to the principles of the African Union.
“It equally deals with human rights implications, especially the right to property. There’re procedures to auction property of an individual. We don’t know how the police have been going through this process to ensure these properties are been auctioned and the bike riders are complaining on the same note,” he said.
“So our advocacy is looking out for how policy changes could be done to ensure there’s a level playground, to ensure that the perpetrators are punished, but that the punishment should at least be commensurate to the kind of offences they commit,” he added.
Assistant Superintendent of Police Daniel Alfred Luseni Bockarie, head of traffic investigations at the SLP, was present at the meeting at SLRSA. He denied all the allegations against the police, describing them as an ‘‘indictment’’ with no proof.
He insisted that the police only engages in auction though the courts system.
‘‘The allegation that the police auctions motorbikes is not true. It is the court which auctions motorbikes and that has been the laid down policy that cannot be changed,” ASP Bockarie said.
“Everybody as a citizen has the right to buy those bikes as long as you have the money and you go through the correct procedures. So to say that it is the police that buy those bikes and steals them later is an unfortunate statement,’’ he added.
Bockarie also said that the police only sends cases involving traffic offences to the court through the Sheriff, who is the Inspector General of Police, and produce a court order which is then publicized by the court and the decision to either auction or not is made then.
ASP Bockarie said all police personnel were under strict instruction not to arrest a moving bike, but he noted that some “bad officers” were defiant of that order. He said such officers are usually investigated and penalized.
SLRSA’s Executive Director, Ibrahim Sannoh, lauded the initiative of CARL to intervene in the matter, noting that the concerns raised by the bike riders were genuine and needed a stakeholders meeting with the relevant authorities to take appropriate actions to resolve the issues.
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