Ex-FRSC boss stresses importance of duty rooms to road safety operations

BY MIKE OCHONMA

A former assistant corps marshal (ACM) of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC), Ayobami Omiyale, has called on commanding officers of the corps to pay attention to what goes on in the duty rooms of their commands.

Omiyale, who shared his experience as sector commander of the FRSC in many states as well as zonal commanding officer, alleged that many clandestine and corrupt practices take place in the duty rooms of the FRSC formations.

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, Omiyale said duty rooms are very strategic to road safety operations.

“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,” the road safety expert said.

“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,” he said.

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 road traffic crashes in the country between 2020 and 2021, Omiyale stated 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 percent in the zone and 9 percent 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,” he said.