Beating the light at FRSC- Peter Oworu

It is intriguing to report the FRSC management facing re-enactments of road traffic situations that its personnel are trained to resolve. At first, it was the gridlock caused by the piling up of anxious potential successors to Corps Marshal Boboye Oyeyemi perplexed by his sitting tight and making no transition arrangements even as his date with due retirement at the age of 60 was days away.

Now the gridlock scenario has been unceremoniously overtaken by the Corps Marshal’s decision to beat the red light quit notice by remaining on his seat more than a week after his November 26, 2020 retirement date.

As the situation persists, there are genuine fears that the ace traffic control agency may have been railroaded into management manifestation of a chaotic traffic snarl, with attendant diversionary consequences on real-time road traffic control.

Since Corps Marshal Boboye Oyeyemi has not found it expedient to add factual or other convincing justification for his defiant body movement it is logical to conclude that he is acting the part of some Nigerian traffic offenders who typically challenge offended road users to a muscle-flexing contest instead of humbly climbing down the high horse.

Read Also:FRSC: Gridlock over tenure limit- Peter Oworu

At FRSC management level this translates into a tacit assumption of extra-official authority to extend an expired tenure until he is “directed” to quit or the gridlocked management of the Corps acts on its outrage over his beating the red light to, as it were, make it well nigh impossible for him to persist in violation of civil service rules and regulations as head of the agency.

The example of the INEC Chairman Mahmoud Yakubu whose tenure expired but did not create any gridlock much less attempt to beat the light by simply and promptly stepping aside and handing over the office to the next man on the line pending the confirmation of his renewed tenure by the Senate is a righteous reference point and precedence that should have been wiser counsel to the Corps Marshal.

There is greater honour in the approved second tenure and return to office of the INEC Chairman which translated into seamless transition on the two occasions and facilitated the smooth continuation of the administration of INEC, than in the bedlam of gridlock and violation of tenure by Boboye’s sit tight attitude that is bound to give way sooner or later to the supremacy of statutory rules and regulations, portraying him in posterity as the Corps Marshal who did not want to leave at the end of his tenure.

This is made even more ludicrous by the very fact of apparent lack of contentment with the various good fortunes of acting appointment, confirmation of appointment and relatively smooth extended tenure the Corps Marshal was privileged by God to witness, even having the audacity to mete out terminal disciplinary sanctions against his colleagues who earlier tried to do what he is doing now, in his hey days in office.

Surely Boboye Oyeyemi cannot feel at ease knowing how his continued retention of office beyond the call of duty amounts to depriving his no less qualified gridlocked colleagues their own opportunity to move up the ladder of hierarchy in the FRSC, especially when he recalls those hypertensive moments when the dice was rolling to fill the vacancy and it could as well have been anyone else.

Ultimately the combination of violations of statutory regulations pertaining to tenure and retirement age both of which are being flaunted by the oga at the top of the FRSC point back with greater indictment at the supervisory authority somewhere in the Presidency which is glaringly failing to uphold due process and respect for rule of law by feigning ignorance thereby aiding and abetting the Corps Marshal’s unilateral extension of tenure and overstay beyond irrefutable retirement age.

Whatever or whoever is responsible for this impunity is doing a great disservice to the FRSC and the Presidency while proving once again that wrongdoing frequently overwhelms righteousness in the affairs of Nigeria and that there are islands of arbitrary exercise of political power that contaminate the process of ethical reform, sending wrong signals to the citizenry that we are still in the grips of “man-know-man” culture of governance.

From gridlock to beating the red light, what comes next at the FRSC?

Oworu writes from Benin