By Sallieu T. Kamara
Traffic police officers the world over mean safety and protection for all road users, including motorists, passengers and pedestrians. But the traffic police in Sierra Leone mean exploitation and institutionalised corruption. The Sierra Leone Police have always deservedly earned the unenviable name of being corrupt, but the scale of corruption within its traffic division is beyond the true imagination of anyone. A lot has been written, and a lot has been said about them, and thousands of innocent people have lost their lives or been maimed as a result of the corrupt actions of these police officers.
Despite all of this, the leadership of the Sierra Leone Police and their supervising ministry, both of whom have a sacred responsibility to protect life and property, continue to maintain criminal silence, whilst the nation bleeds. When has the white long-sleeves shirt, which the traffic police officer wears to make them conspicuous, become a license to deliberately inflict serious hardship on an already impoverished people? The Inspector-General of Police, Francis Munu, can do this nation a world of good if he does answer this question.
And I hope Mr. Munu and the entire leadership of the Sierra Leone Police will see reason this time around to fully and adequately address the menace of the Sierra Leone traffic police. It is a very serious issue that has the tendency to further mitigate efforts by Government and its partners to improve food security and food sovereignty in Sierra Leone.
What do I mean? To answer to this, let me take you on a journey that will highlight the callous disregard of the traffic police for the suffering of the ordinary man and woman in the country. I have been a frequent traveller of late to the provinces and my experience with the traffic police always makes me sick. The distance from Freetown to my village at Kagbantama is 90 + miles. Dotted along this distance are 15 police checkpoints – or more appropriately called Exploitation Points – which gives an average of one checkpoint per every five miles. The last of these is on the outskirts of Port Loko, about 70 something miles from Freetown.
At each of these checkpoints drivers are required to pay certain amounts of money to traffic police and the traffic wardens who together man these points. These amounts range between Le 2,000 and Le 30,000 and they are referred to as Booking. Let us say that the average amount each driver pays to each of these checkpoints is Le 8,000. It means that a driver of a 25-seater minibus plying the Freetown-Port Loko route will have to pay an average of Le 120,000 to the traffic police every day. If one driver alone pays such a colossal amount, can we imagine how much the traffic police officers criminally collect from drivers across the country every day?
What does this mean? It means high transport fares, as the drivers will have to factor all the bribes they pay to the police into the fares that they charge their passengers. The passengers in turn, particularly the businesspeople, will pass on the burden onto the consumer by translating the high costs of transportation they pay into high costs of foodstuff. Do you now see how the corrupt activities of the traffic police are contributing to poverty and hardship in the country?
Ideally, the functions of the traffic police pertain to traffic management, regulation, enforcement of traffic rules and regulations and road safety education to all road users. In essence, the traffic police hold the responsibility to provide safe and smooth flow of traffic, prevent road accidents, inculcate a sense of discipline amongst road users and educate the general public, including school children, on road safety. How much of this are the Sierra Leone traffic police doing? Very little!
Perhaps, the most disheartening about the traffic police is their seeming disregard for national security. The main purpose of having traffic police on strategic locations around the country is not to collect bribes under the cloak of Bookings from drivers, but to ensure that vehicles plying the roads are in a good working condition that can guarantee the safety and security of users. Also, they should check for and apprehend criminals who are running away from justice, as well as check out for contraband goods, offensive weapons and drugs. But the lust for money has taken primacy over all of this.
You hardly see a traffic police officer going close to a stationary vehicle. On hearing the sound of an approaching vehicle, they will come out of their huts and signal to the driver to stop or simply flag him to do so. As the driver is negotiating his stop, the police will quickly go back to the office hut or baffa and wait for the driver or his mate to come and pay for their Booking. So whether the vehicle is loaded with criminals, drugs or weapons, the police don’t care at all as long as their pockets have been lined with ill-gotten money. This accounts for many derelict vehicles that can easily pass for death traps, plying the roads across the country, at the detriment of the lives of the people. This is also the reason why drugs are moved with ease in and outside the country.
Let us now relate the impacts of the activities of the traffic police on poverty and hardship in the country. Most of the food we eat is grown upcountry, in very small villages that are largely fraught with bad roads. For the farmers in these communities, they depend for everything that they do on the proceeds from their farms: food, medication, school fees for their children, marriage, clothing and other societal needs. And because almost everybody in these communities is a farmer, they can only raise money from their produce when they take them to markets outside their communities for sale. They need vehicles to be able to do that.
But again, because of the prohibitive costs of transportation, many of the farmers cannot take their produce to markets outside their locality and in the absence of a good storage facility the produce gets rot. This situation does not only deprive farmers, it also demotivates them from continuing with their trade, hence the mass exodus of people, particularly young ones, to cities and towns across the country. The traffic police share the blame for this.
On the other hand, the very few farmers, or traders, who dare to bring their produce such as cassava, pepper, cocoa, potato among others, to cities and towns including Freetown, pay exorbitant transport fares that they have to ineluctably reflect on the prices they charge for their goods. For Freetown, my experience is that in trying to run away from the excesses of the traffic police, the drivers will rather terminate at Waterloo and not enter Freetown. The traders and farmers that are coming with produce to sell in Freetown will then have the added burden of hiring another vehicle to convey them to Freetown. Sometimes, the produce rot before the farmer or trader gets another means of reaching Freetown thereby forcing them to sell their wares at substantially reduced prices leaving them penniless.
For those drivers that enter Freetown, they are also afraid to face the wrath of the police in the city centre so the farthest point they can reach is the Dan Street Lorry Park. This again leaves the traders and farmers with the burden of using pushcarts or Omolankays and wheelbarrows to transport their goods to stores in the central and western parts of the city. By the time they complete the exercise, they become or are seen as exploiters or they lose out. Either way, the impact is not good for the development of this country. Again, the blame must be placed on the traffic police.
I am not in any way deluding that the police are not vital to the well-being of the country. In fact, I cannot imagine a country without a police for just one hour, let alone live there. But the traffic police are a sore in the Sierra Leone Police. And the failure of successive leaderships of the SLP to address this perennial problem makes many people want to believe that they are also benefiting from this criminal enterprise. If anything, why do they always give deaf ears to the cry and plight of the people!
What about the Anti-Corruption Commission? What are they doing about this? Because certainly, they cannot say that they are not aware of the high level corruption in the traffic police. For me, these are some of the areas that the ACC should pay great attention to because if they are able to instil sanity in this area, there will be some improvement in the living conditions of the masses. At least, this is my assumption.
The drivers’ unions that are scattered all over the country and are busy collecting monies from drivers every day should have concerned themselves with this problem. It falls within their mandate to champion it, as no individual driver dares resist the traffic police. Any driver who attempts to stand against the corruption of the traffic police will pay dearly: he will always be dragged to court, sometimes on trumped-up charges that are amplified to scare those who may want to follow suit. In a judicial system like ours that is weak and poorly funded, the drivers will hardly get justice. But the drivers unions are absolutely useless, to say the least.
Until IG Francis Munu and his team take immediate and firm action to minimize the menace and indiscipline of the traffic police, the people will continue to have no respite. And the recklessness with which they conduct their criminal enterprise has the potential to lead to serious physical confrontations between the traffic police and traffic wardens on the one hand and the drivers and passengers on the other. Don’t think it is impossible because the people are getting fed-up and nobody seems to be listening and acting on their complaints.
In fact, I witnessed a similar scene on Sunday afternoon at Shell in the east of Freetown where a traffic policeman stupidly stood in front of a vehicle in motion if only to stop it with his body. I was sitting right in front of the vehicle sharing the driver’s seat. And you know what, this very vehicle developed several problems on the way and the driver was heading for the garage. He had already called and informed the mechanics. And here was a traffic police officer that did not know the condition of the vehicle attempting to stop it with his bare hands even when the driver was pleading with him to allow him to park in a safe place.
And right in front of the police was a scene of two women and a poda-poda driver’s mate exchanging fisticuffs. One of the women was carrying a young baby in her hands. The two police stood aloof, pretending as if something requiring their intervention was not happening around them. They were so oblivious of the consequences on the helpless women. Everybody within the vicinity of the scene was shouting at them to intervene and save the two women, but they paid no heed, as they were busy preparing a case against the driver, who was their prey of the moment. This demonstration of insensitivity aroused the hostility of the people against them. So you see?
After all, what do we expect from the suffering people when their protector has himself become their chief exploiter?
