When Drivers And Passengers Unite Against A Scheme

Adamu Gashua, a driver at the Karu Motor Park in Abuja, told Sunday Trust that the scheme is another form of exploitation, devised by the leadership of the union to short change its members. “No driver is happy with the scheme, we are all crying foul because we know nobody will benefit from the money […]

Adamu Gashua, a driver at the Karu Motor Park in Abuja, told Sunday Trust that the scheme is another form of exploitation, devised by the leadership of the union to short change its members. “No driver is happy with the scheme, we are all crying foul because we know nobody will benefit from the money we are made to pay for every trip.

“Okay, now one of our drivers here had an accident on his way to Jalingo on Monday, but right now, as I’m speaking to you, he is in his house at Keffi because he cannot afford medical treatment. He said the emergency number on the scratch card provided by the insurance companies did not go through when he called to tell them of his accident.
“In fact, a woman died in the accident and the taxi with the registration number CN 618 APP got damaged,” he said.
For Ahmed Muhammad, one of the park officials, the scheme has taken off with a number of problems. He said convincing the drivers to pay is a big challenge that is threatening to ruin the scheme.
“Most of the drivers here are not educated so before you can convince them to sign up the insurance, which has to do with money, it is very difficult, especially with the current situation in the country where any organization can come up with any policy and start making money off people; it is most difficult to convince drivers to part with their hard earned money,” he said.
Ahmed also said that passengers are supposed to be charged higher fares so as to use part of the money to pay for the insurance, but passengers are unwilling to pay. “If you ask passengers to pay, definitely, they will run away from us. Even without paying extra money they are still running away from us,” he lamented.
He stressed that the inability of the insurance companies to play their parts effectively in the scheme is what has made it appear fraudulent to the drivers.
“When the former scheme called Lisament existed for over ten years and the drivers did not benefit from it, it has made them unwilling to embrace this one, especially as the charge has gone up from N100 to N250 for taxis and N350 for buses,” Ahmed said.
The RAHIS is a new scheme that is meant to provide life insurance cover for drivers and passengers who travel on the accident-prone Nigerian roads. Niger Insurance and PHB Insurance are the underwriters.
The national chairman of NURTW, Alhaji Gidado Hamman, could not be reached last Friday for comments, as he was said to have travelled for the lesser hajj in Saudi Arabia. But in an earlier interview with Sunday Trust, the NURTW boss had said that the union decided to float the scheme to cover both commercial drivers with their vehicles and the passengers.
“With the scheme, commercial drivers that use saloon cars paid twenty naira daily while bus drivers paid fifty naira on a daily basis,” he said.
“We are motivated by the insurance scheme initiated by the federal government because 99.5 per cent of our members are what you call casual workers. They work for years without employment letters. It is a case of hire and fire,” he added.
Explaining further, Gidado said “accident victim are entitled to treatment of up to forty thousand naira and if there is permanent disability after treatment, the victim will be paid hundred thousand naira. However, if the victim dies, the family is entitled to one hundred and fifty naira while drivers who are members of the scheme are entitled to treatments worth one hundred and fifty thousand naira”.
When contacted for comments over the concerns being raised by both drivers and passengers over the scheme, the Sector Commander of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) in the Federal Capital Territory, Mr Nsebong Apkabio, told Sunday Trust that the scheme was not intended to defraud anybody.
“The drivers’ concerns are understandably based on the previous sharp practices that obtained in the insurance industry; but with the present reform that is going on in the financial sector, no bank will want to toy with their integrity by defrauding their clients. In the same vein, I am sure that the insurance companies involved must have fine tuned arrangements with the executive members of the NURTW and their legal advisors before the agreement was reached. So, there is no reason to suspect any foul play. Rather, I will advise Nigerians and the drivers to give the scheme a chance to work,” he said.
The commander maintained that the scheme is a welcome development, especially as it is in line with the FRSC regulations of 2004. He noted that most of the vehicle owners are always too much in a hurry to make money for them to be concerned with the safety of the passengers and the drivers. He also advised the passengers to ensure that they give accurate details of their names, addresses and contact details of their next of kins so as to enable the operators contact their relatives in the eventuality of any mishap.
One other problem that threatens the scheme and has been doing damage road transport business as a whole is the issue of touts at motor parks. Amobi Omosanjuwa, a bus driver who plies Abuja and Lagos roads with his vehicle, told Sunday Trust that “the activities of these touts are really getting worrisome.
“Their case is like that of what is commonly referred to as ‘monkey-dey-work, baboon-dey-chop’, because, before any vehicle can come out of the park with full load of passengers, the driver must settle the boys. And this settlement can range from three thousand to five thousand naira on each vehicle and I can tell you that a lot of vehicles load passengers from this park on a daily basis.
“So at the end, you discover that these boys don’t really do anything apart from terrorizing people and probably calling for passengers and at the end, they earn far more than the drivers and the bus owners,” he added. 
Another bus driver who plies Abuja-Enugu routes said that ordinarily, there are some specific rules that these union guys have in place for anybody who must pick up passengers from the park.
“For instance, whenever I pick passengers from the park on my way to Enugu, I usually have to settle a lot of boys. Some of them are union guys while others are just conductors who assist in calling passengers into the bus. Apart from these people, you still have to pay the AMAC boys at the gate before they can allow you to go out of the park. So, in all, the exploitation is just too much and these people collect the money without any consideration for the drivers and owners of the buses,” he complained.
One of the passengers who spoke to this medium on condition of anonymity, however, complained about the excesses of touts in the parks. According to him, ‘the government should really do something about these boys. How can some group of people just call themselves union boys and be exploiting drivers who are trying to earn a legitimate income for themselves. The money they collect from the drivers is just too much.”
But Tunji Bella, a member of the road transport workers’ union at Jabi Motor Park I Abuja, distanced the union from the activities of touts. “We are not touts; we are normal Nigerians trying to earn a living. You will be surprised to see that we have university graduates and polytechnic graduates among us. So, it is not fair when people refer to us as touts,” he said.
Another member of the union, Rilwan Ibrahim, explained that “a lot of people have many negative information about our union which is not true. For instance, if you want to bring your vehicle to this park for commercial purposes, you are required to register it with about six thousand naira depending on the size of the bus and the routes which you want to ply. After that, you will be asked to pay 5 per cent of the total amount of money you make on each trip and you must pay the money before you leave the park. If not your tyre would be deflated. But for those who do not register with our union and they want to pick passengers in this park, they will pay 10 percent of the total money their passengers paid  to the union, in addition to any other fees charged by AMAC and other unions in the park.”
According to Lawrence Fadipe, the NURTW chairman controlling taxis and cabs in the Abuja metropolis, “union members go daily with the vehicles to pick passengers from all over Abuja. We have another branch of the union in Area 1, and we have constantly told them to be law-abiding and peaceful. We don’t want our members to cause traffic jams. In fact, most of the boys there are not actually doing what we asked them to do.
On the touting activities that take place in the parks, he attributed the trend to the inability of the government to provide basic infrastructures needed for the park to thrive. He said: “Blame the state of the parks to the government. They collect toll money from our drivers and yet they don’t provide us with the basic amenities that we require. The government should come out and assist us. This park was allocated to three unions which include the National Union of Road Transport Workers, the national union of road transport owners (NARTO) and Road Transport Employers Association. So, if the government cannot develop the parks, then they should allow the unions to develop (them).”
Comrade Edie Nwabueze, the Deputy National President of Road Transport Employers Association of Nigeria (in charge of administration), said their organization was established by decrees 21 and 22 of 1978 with a mandate to control motor parks’ activities.
“We are the owners of the vehicles. It is our mandate to secure the vehicles. The constitution of the organization specifies that we should have absolute control of all motor parks’ activities in Nigeria. We are also to manage the safety of the passengers’ luggage. As it is, we have categories of workers. What qualifies you to be a member of this organization is that you must be an owner of a vehicle that is used for transportation.
“As soon as you have your vehicles, you come here and get it registered. We will take record of the vehicle and details of the particulars. So, whatever directives that are passed down to the union would be communicated to you through the union. For instance, when the FCT administration directed that all commercial vehicles in Abuja should be painted with the commercial colours, they didn’t call all the drivers or the vehicle owners, instead, they called the unions and we communicated the instructions down to the vehicle owners,” he said.
On the relationship between his union and other unions like the NURTW and the rest, Nwabueze said that the NURTW, as the name implies, means that they are workers.
“In other words, they are the drivers. The NURTW is registered to protect the economic interests of the drivers while our union is registered to protect the economic interests of the vehicle owners,” he said.
On the touts’ activities in the motor parks and the criminality that takes place, Nwabueze said his union members are not involved in them. “We are the owners of the vehicles and by this, we are to protect our vehicles. For instance, if you buy a vehicle, you will not want anything to damage it. That is why we avoid crisis and violence because in the eventuality of any crisis within the motor parks, the vehicles would be damaged and the cost of repairing those damages would be borne by the vehicle owners.
“But if you see what happens in the NURTW, in the eventuality of violence and vehicles are damaged, the drivers would only remove their drivers’ licenses and look for other vehicles to drive,” he noted.
On what the union is doing to make the motor parks free of violence and touting, Nwabueze said: “This is where we want the government to come in. For instance, I can authoritatively tell you that even the government is fuelling the crisis in this motor park, because this is an established and approved motor park by the government. We were operating at Area 1 and other various places but the government said we should all come to this place in line with the modernization of the city.
“But all modern facilities are not here. And the worst of it all is that instead of allowing the entire transport operators to come here, they started giving approvals for individuals to be loading on the road, such that there are illegal parks everywhere.
“Under normal circumstances, in a normal park, there ought to be facilities in place such that when passengers come into the park, they will wait patiently for buses going to their destination to arrive. But instead, they are exploiting us and collecting money from us without giving any facilities.
“At the gate, you will see officials of the Abuja Municipal Area Council, AMAC, collecting money from people. They collect as high as N280 from every vehicle that loads passengers from this park. And instead of providing infrastructures for us, they are even demanding for more money.
“If you look around, you will see partakers around, and these are what fuel the violence we are talking about because they keep dangerous weapons inside. As responsible members who have families to answer to, we are law abiding and we will remain law abiding. We are ready to cooperate with members of the law enforcement agents in the country to flush out criminals and touts away from the parks,” he said.