How FRSC emerged best in FG website performance under new Corps Marshal

By Bisi Kazeem

Nigeria is one of the few African countries that have leveraged some road safety principles and recorded remarkable progress in road safety administration and management despite a ‘gloomy’ beginning.

The road safety situation in Nigeria was so deplorable that the World Health Organisation once described the country as ‘worst in the world to travel’ only next to Ethiopia.

That narrative changed through government’s efforts by establishing the Federal Road Safety Commission as the Lead Agency to guarantee safety on every centimetre of Nigeria’s expansive road network of 204,000km. This establishment was done ten years prior to United Nations’ recommendation for all member states to establish agencies directly situated under the central government for ease of unfettered operation.

In its three decades of unbroken services to humanity as a lead agency in traffic and safety management, FRSC has recorded tremendous achievements in the area of Traffic Engineering, Road Safety Administration, Traffic Management and Crash Reduction.

The Corps has now come of age after going through good times and tides. Through the use of state of the art Information Technology facilities, the Corps has been able to enhance its operational capacity aimed at promoting public safety and security. Having been propelled by the imperatives of entrenching ease of doing business as well as aligning with international standards in all fronts, the Corps has successfully designed and operated over 30 web applications for its operational activities so as to create an accessible platform for the general public.

Some of these applications cover the Uniform Licensing Scheme, under which is the One Driver One Record which enables FRSC to track and match records of drivers with their drivers licence, vehicle number plate, traffic offences and others in a single view.

Introduction of the toll free 122 emergency number and a 24 hours call centre established to reduce response time for crash victims; a single step that has reduced emergency response time from 50 minutes to 15 minutes, thereby decreasing the number of fatalities in crash situations. More so, the introduction of Verification Portal for drivers licence and number plates, the introduction of the Road Transport Safety Standardisation Scheme (RTSSS) for uniformity and harmonization of fleet operators in the country, the Driving School Standardisation Scheme (DSSP), the introduction of the speed limiting device whose enforcement began on 1st February, 2017, introduction of vehicle and body-worn cameras to monitor patrol operations, and the vehicle tracking system among others, are policies formulated and implemented to fight road traffic crash in the country to extinction.

The Corps led that foundation for itself, knowing that the road transportation sector in Nigeria accounts for over 90% of passengers and freight movement, and this exerts undue pressure on the FRSC in discharging its cardinal responsibilities.

In view of the growing need to surmount these visible and invisible challenges, the Corps embarked on several reforms which include but not limited to the following: Development of a national road safety strategy road map, improved operational efficiency, enhanced regulatory environment, and accelerated response capability to situations that needed immediate actions.

Added to the aforementioned, the Corps took a step further, defined its path in tandem with UN decade of action as well as the mantra of functional 21st century organization by chatting a path to meet the Accra Declaration of 50% Reduction in Fatality by 2015.

That aside, it went all the way to institute modalities to achieve UN Decade of Action on Road Safety of 50% Fatality Reduction by 2020, and placed Nigerian roads within the league of 20 global safest roads by 2020, as well as UN Decade of Action 2021-2030 which aims at having a society where crashes result in no deaths.

To achieve the stated targets, the Corps developed transformational initiatives focused on People, Processes and Technology (PPT).

That is why today, not only do its staff pride as the most disciplined, but the Corps stands as the best Information Technology-driven organization in Nigeria with its robust data base and over 95 percentage digitalized administrative and operational procedures.

Having given that background, it is noteworthy to look at how the Corps, under the leadership of the present Corps Marshal, Shehu Mohammed, who of course, was amongst members of the group who blazed the trail to set up what is now known as a technology-driven organization, emerged the best amongst over 315 MDAs in website performance and ranking.

It may interest you to know that the 2023-2024 Federal Government Scorecard for ranking Websites of Ministries, Departments and Agencies is an essential benchmark for evaluating the current state of government websites in Nigeria.

The FRSC’s website was selected as the best following a very meticulous, highly diligent and extremely objective review of the Websites of 315 MDAs which were subjected to evaluation for the period under consideration.

The Bureau of Public Service Reforms, a Federal Government agency under the Presidency that organised and issued the award on behalf of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu GCFR justified the relevance of the ranking.

According to them, the effectiveness and functionality of government websites have become a critical component of Nigeria’s public service reform agenda as the nation increasingly adopts digital platforms as the primary means of communication, service delivery and information dissemination. As such, FRSC’s website was found to host a huge collection of information about all products and services of the Corps for the consumption of the general public. This feat placed the Corps ahead of its contemporaries in public service.

That said, to unravel the mystery behind how FRSC made it to the top in information technology and eventually emerged best amongst peers, it is important to look at the direction of leadership and policy focus of the administration of Corps Marshal Shehu Mohammed.

The trajectory of his career as a road safety professional from the day he joined the services of the agency till date is the very factor that has shaped him as an all-rounder in road safety management and administration with a firm and fair handling of goal-oriented affairs as the Corps Marshal.

Upon assumption of office, Shehu Mohammed alongside his team of management, designed and implemented programmes of action, as well as a proactive template to advance the growth of the Corps in all ramifications, with the aim of trending down road crashes and fatality rate.

Being a believer in technology, the Corps Marshal made the digitisation of FRSC operations a cardinal part of his policy thrust. To that end, he took a bold step that was the first of its kind since the establishment of the Corps, by appointing a Technical Adviser who will mount the wheels that would eventually bring FRSC to speed in the deployment of information technology in the work place.

This placement of round pegs in round holes was the catalyst, the propellant force, as well as the icing on the cake that catapulted the Corps to more enviable heights and achievements in digitisation.

Retrospectively, Corps Marshal Shehu Mohammed has been an integral part of the digitalization process and has driven the technology feat of this noble organization for years now, beginning from Corps Marshal Osita Chidoka who started the revolution to the erstwhile Corps Marshal, Dr. Boboye Oyeyemi who sustained the expertise, through to the immediate past Corps Marshal, Dauda Ali Biu who kept the momentum.

To say the least, his experience has seen the Corps measuring to billing as he is already on the glorious path of unravelling the mystery that would finally bring about the overall digitisation of FRSC operations.

Additionally, just as stated in my last piece, part of the major initiatives introduced by Corps Marshal Shehu Mohammed that brought about the needed result for the Corps is the ongoing digital revolution.

The introduction of Electronic Document Management System (paperless) in the workplace would surely make FRSC the first Federal Government agency to go paperless. This initiative, apart from the speed it will bring to the workplace, will also enhance ease of doing business and bring down the cost of governance.

In the same vein, adequate progress is being recorded on the operational front too. Shehu Mohammed has gone a step further by initiating and launching the first FRSC Mobile Application, a one-stop shop for all FRSC products and services, for quality service delivery.

The FRSC Mobile App was introduced to generate and analyse real-time data on operations, Traffic Crashes data management, and road conditions, and provide customers with feedback on the Corps’ products.

The introduction of the National Crash Information Recording System portal (NACRIS) is another ground-breaking robust data collation initiative that will help in policy formulation, planning, and education.

With this portal, Nigerians could easily report cases of crashes from the point of crash. This initiative will boost data legitimacy and change global perception of FRSC crash data reports for good.

The Corps under his purposeful leadership has proved to be right on track to allay the menace of road traffic crashes on Nigerian roads and usher in a season where there would be no crashes; where even if crashes will occur, it would not result in the death of any Nigerian.

Achievements of such would be recorded based on many pillars and strict implementation of his policy thrust fused in the Corporate Strategic goals of the Corps.

To this end, suffice to state that as a performance-driven organization, with clearly set measurable Key Performance Indicators, FRSC is today, the only law enforcement organization in Nigeria certified by the International Standard Organization.

* Bisi Kazeem, a veteran road safety professional and a public relations expert, writes from Lagos, Nigeria.

Farooq Kperogi : October surprise in American presidential elections

Several faithful readers of this column who have followed it from the mid-2000s in the Weekly Trust have asked me to spice up my columns with occasional commentaries on American politics and culture, which was the column’s dominant thematic preoccupation in its earliest incarnation.

This year’s presidential election offers an opportunity to do that. This week I want to explore a phenomenon called the “October Surprise” in American presidential elections about which I had written 16 years ago when Barack Obama and John McCain squared off.

An “October Surprise” is any dramatic last-minute event, typically in October but occasionally a little later than October, that swings the election to the disadvantage of a leading candidate. Such dramatic events are believed to have the potential to influence the outcome of the election by swaying public opinion or shifting the narrative around the candidates.

October surprises symbolize the unpredictable nature of the final stretch of the presidential campaign and the high stakes involved in influencing the electorate.

Before talking about what this presidential election year’s October Surprise will be, I want to reference previous notable “October Surprises” and how they influenced the outcome of past elections.

The term “October Surprise” was coined during the 1980 presidential election between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter (the only president my state of Georgia has produced). A year before Election Day, radical Iranian students had invaded the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran, and held the Americans they found there hostage.

President Carter worked throughout the campaign to secure the release of the American hostages during which eight American servicemen were killed.

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According to the Associated Press, “Critics say the Reagan team was so concerned that Carter would gain a boost by winning their release just before the election, that his campaign manager and others negotiated privately with the Iranians to ensure that did not happen.” This cost Carter the 1980 election.

But before October Surprise became entrenched in America’s political lexicon beginning in 1980, it happened eight years earlier. In 1972, according to American presidential historians, President Richard Nixon’s administration announced a potential breakthrough in the Vietnam peace talks, which bolstered Nixon’s re-election prospects. The war was a sticking point in the country.

During the 2000 presidential election, the October Surprise was a damning revelation that George W. Bush had been arrested for driving while he was drunk. It’s called DUI (i.e., driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs) here. It negatively impacted his image among voters, which probably caused him to lose the popular vote—and only narrowly win the Electoral College vote.

Bush became president only because of America’s strange, archaic, and convoluted system of electing presidents, which deprives voters of the opportunity to directly elect their presidents. He was declared president because he won the then battleground state of Florida by 537 votes out of nearly six million cast, which gave him the state’s Electoral College votes.

In the final weeks of the 2004 election, all the major polls predicted that John Kerry would defeat Bush. He was a bumbling, incompetent president who was very unpopular.

Then Osama bin Laden allegedly issued a videotape that criticized Bush and warned U.S. voters that “your security is in your own hands” in the election.

“It changed the entire dynamic of the last five days,” Kerry told newsmen in 2008. “We saw it in the polling. There was no other intervening event. We saw the polls freeze and then we saw them drop a point, because all the security moms, it agitated people over 9/11.”

There was also an October Surprise in the 2008 presidential election that nearly torpedoed Obama’s lead and punctured his campaign’s overweening confidence. On October 30, 2008, conservative British newspaper TimesOnline broke the news of Obama’s late father’s half-sister, identified as Zeituni Oyango, living in the United States illegally and that she first came to the U.S. on the invitation of Obama.

The woman was mentioned in Obama’s best-selling autobiography Dreams From My Father.

She was invited by Obama to the United States to witness his swearing-in as a U.S. senator. She returned to Kenya after Obama’s inauguration and came back again on her own. She applied for asylum, but her application was rejected and was ordered to be deported back to Kenya.

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But she somehow escaped and had been living in the slums of Boston. The TimesOnline story initially did not gain traction in the United States until the Associated Press pounced on it and added a fresh dimension: that Obama’s aunt was not only here illegally but had contributed money to the Obama campaign, which violates America’s campaign laws, which stipulate that only U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents can contribute to political campaigns.

The news dramatized Obama’s “otherness” in more concrete ways than the McCain camp had tried vainly to do. Because AP’s reporting showed that the woman contributed up to $265 to the Obama campaign even though she was neither a U.S. citizen nor a lawful permanent resident, she helped to feed the Republican Party-inspired allegations that Obama’s unprecedented financial buoyancy was consequent on his receiving illegal donations from non-Americans.

What saved Obama was that Sarah Palin, McCain’s running mate, fell for a cheap prank by two well-known Canadian comedians by the names of Marc-Antoine Audette and Sebastien Trudel who go by the stage name “the Masked Avengers.”

They put a call through to Sarah Palin, which she picked. One of the comedians pretended to be then French president Nicholas Sarkosky. Palin believed him. And she went on for over 5 minutes discussing inane issues with the “French president.” The conversation further betrayed her shallowness and ignorance of foreign policy issues.

This dominated the news cycle days before the election. Sarah Palin’s inability to detect that she was being tricked even in the face of so many red flags during the conversation had the effect of canceling out the scandal of Obama’s aunt living illegally in the US and making illegal donations to Obama’s campaign. (Obama’s aunt later became a legal permanent resident in 2010 but died four years later).

Finally, in the 2016 presidential election, FBI Director James Comey announced that a renewed investigation had been launched into Hillary Clinton’s email practices. This became a major talking point just 11 days before the election, which some argued influenced the final vote. Although she defeated Donald Trump by three million votes, America’s Electoral College system caused her to lose the presidency.

So what might be the October Surprise in this year’s presidential election? It’s hard to tell, particularly because Donald Trump is not a conventional candidate. He is the most morally flawed, most openly racist, and most explicitly psychologically damaged presidential candidate America has had in recent memory. Yet nothing seems to stick to him.

He once boasted that he could murder someone in broad daylight in the streets of New York and nothing would happen to him. He is what Americans call a “Teflon candidate.” Teflon is a substance used to cover the surface of cooking utensils, etc. in order to prevent extraneous substances from sticking to them).

If any candidate should be fearful of an October Surprise, it should be Vice President Kamala Harris, whom polls favor to win both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote and make history as the first woman to be president of the United States.

Had the attempt on Trump’s life taken place in October, that would have been the October Surprise that would hand him the presidency. Some people think it may happen again next month.

Farooq Kperogi : October surprise in American presidential elections

Farooq Kperogi is a renowned Nigerian columnist  and United States-based professor of journalism.

Farooq Kperogi: Conspiracy of price gouging between Dangote and NNPCL

Farooq Kperogi: Conspiracy of price gouging between Dangote and NNPCL

Farooq Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism.