Probe FRSC duty room, ex-commander says it reeks of corruption

A former Assistant Corps Marshal (ACM) of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC), Ayobami Omiyale, says the Duty Rooms of the FRSC formations are places where clandestine and corrupt practices take place.

Commander Omiyale, who shared his experience as Sector Commander of the FRSC in many states as well as Zonal Commanding Officer, called on Commanding Officers to put an extra eye on duty rooms of their commands.

According to the road safety expert, who made this observation recently while delivering a paper titled ‘Promotion of Strategic partnership for innovative road safety intervention in Lagos and Ogun states’, at the third quarter retreat of the FRSC RS2, in Lagos, duty rooms are very strategic to road safety operations.

He advised that “all duty rooms must be audited and investigated on a monthly basis as this is the engine room of operations in the FRSC.

“All books and registers must be inspected daily for lapses, mutilations, omissions, wrong entries and errors which will be corrected immediately.

“Daily entries of impoundments, confiscations and payments should be forwarded to the zonal headquarters on a weekly basis with a zonal duty room officer appointed to supervise the process.”

Omiyale also faulted the FRSC for its open-ended vision statement of eradicating Road Traffic Crashes (RTC) on all roads.

Presenting statistics that showed an exponential increase in the number of RTC in the country between 2020 and 2021, Omiyale stated, “it can be gleaned from the foregoing tables that contrary to the vision statement of FRSC, which is to eradicate road traffic crashes on all roads, the crashes are actually escalating exponentially by 25% in the zone and 9% in the whole country between year 2020 and 2021.

“Casualties also rose by the same percentages within the same period. The purport of this is that our thirteen-year-old vision is not working, has never worked and needs to be overhauled in order to achieve a more realistic and achievable vision that can be measured and is time-bound.”