Residents groan under new transport scheme

 

Commuters waiting to board government luxury buses at Nyanya area, Abuja on Monday

 

Although the new scheme for public transport services was introduced by the Federal Capital Territory Administration to cater for the daily influx of people into Abuja, it may not have achieved the desired goals as expected.

The scheme was designed to improve transportation in the city so as to enable commuters to get to their destinations safely and in good time. Also, it was meant to boost transportation on feeder roads and to check traffic jams on high capacity bus routes.

Needless to add, the policy led to the banning of commercial mini-buses, popularly known as Araba, from operating in Abuja and its environs.

Under the scheme, government has granted operating licenses to five mass transit operators who will ply designated routes in the capital city with high capacity buses. They are Shaanxi Auto Limited, ATCS Limited, City-Cab Limited, Print Field Enterprises Limited and Corporate Drivers Nigeria Limited.

Before the reintroduction of the policy, the FCTA promised to cater for the transport needs of concerned residents and workers coming from outside the city centre by introducing adequate, efficient and affordable high capacity buses.

The FCT Minister, Senator Bala Mohammed, who spoke on the policy in Abuja, also indicated that the administration had licensed some taxi cab operators with security gadgets for monitoring and evaluation to ply the routes where the high capacity buses would have difficulty operating.

The minister had said the ban on mini-buses was not meant to cause hardship to commuters. “We have over 700 high capacity buses in the FCT, the Abuja Urban Mass Transit Company has about 300, the NURTW has about 200, and other licensed operators have about 200.

“But the mini buses will not allow them to work seriously. You only work on the basis of profitability. You will see the high capacity buses burning their gas without any passenger because the mini bus people will not give them any breathing space. Besides, they are reckless and undisciplined.

“So, we want to get a minimal cavity of monopoly for the high capacity buses and routes have been designated for mini and high capacity buses. This will decongest the traffic gridlock being experienced in the city,” Mohammed said.

It seems that ever since the policy was re-introduced, workers in Abuja have continued to suffer inconveniences.

Reacting to this, a contractor resident in the Gwarimpa area, Esther Akpata, says, “It is really affecting everybody. There used to be buses conveying passengers from Gwarimpa to Wuse and other places, but now you have to take a cab. They did not provide enough buses. People are finding it difficult to cope with the situation.

“In the past, it took one minute to get a bus to Gwarimpa, unlike now that you can wait for hours before you can get a bus.

“In fact in Gwarimpa, there are no long buses. The people are suffering. They should have provided enough buses before banning the commercial buses from plying the road.”

Investigation by our correspondent shows that the policy has further complicated the traffic situation on the roads. Gridlocks are common in some routes, such as Gwarimpa, Nyanya and Mararaba.

The roads are now filled with rickety vehicles and reckless driving has become the order of the day. The most guilty are drivers employed by government for the high-capacity buses. They drive recklessly and do not obey traffic rules. Most times they intimidate and in some occasions, push smaller cars off the roads. There is hardly any day on Mararaba route that they are not engaged in one disagreement or another with other road users.

Innocent Oweh, a resident of Nyanya, says the difficulty experienced by motorists on the road is better imagined than recounted.

“We are really not happy with the gridlock on this our road. It makes us motorists undergo a harrowing experience each day and government doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it. Rather, government is redesigning and reconstructing other roads in the city centres leaving us (Nyanya-Mararaba) to suffer.

“Last night, I got home around 10pm as a result of the traffic jam, coupled with the fuel scarcity rocking the FCT. So you can imagine what we are facing here. Let us not forget the stress I must have gone through at my workplace. All these are having a toll on our health and government needs to come to our aid as soon as possible,” he says.

Similarly, Mrs. Stella Adeleke, who works as a confidential secretary with a private firm and lives in Suleja, thinks the policy is “horrible”.

“The people are not finding it easy. Where we live in Suleja, you wake up in the morning, you see people waiting at the bus-stop hustling to make their way to Abuja.

“Sometimes, while you wait at the bus-stop and it rains, there is nowhere to hide. Sometimes you would have waited for a long time before one bus will emerge. Out of desperation, people scramble for the vehicle at such a time.

“It becomes difficult to persuade people to join the queue because of the population and the pressure to get to your destination within time. Most people will stand all the way to Abuja because you don’t know when another bus will come. You get to work exhausted. Sometimes I leave my house by 5 a.m. just to get to the office by 7pm,” she says.

Although she sees nothing wrong with the policy, Mrs. Adeleke says the implementation has been shoddy, while the spill-over effect is devastating.

“They (Government) should think of a better way of implementing it. These days, you only know when you come out; you don’t know when you will get to your office. If you are targeting one hour, it will take you like two and half hours because those buses will stop at every bus stop to pick passengers. Government should come to our aid.

Reviewing the transport policy, the Policy and Campaign Manager of the, Actionaid Nigeria, Mr. Tunde Aremu, in an interview with our correspondent, says, “It is a policy that is not well thought out. There is nothing wrong in trying to organise a sector and clean the environment, but you don’t do it at the expense of the people and without thinking about the multiplier effect. When the FCT initially came up with the idea, there was protest by the public. Policies are meant for people not the other way round. This is an imposition; people didn’t have a say in it. People should have a say on how they are governed. This is part of the challenges we are having in this country. There is chaos everywhere.”

Regarding his personal experience, Aremu says, “I am actually in traffic in Gwarimpa right now. We have been in this traffic for over one hour now for a journey that should not take more than 15 minutes. What is responsible for this is that there are now more people bringing out their private vehicles- people who initially had been using commercial buses. These days you see all these old Subaru, Datsun, 504 on the road. The policy is causing traffic congestion everywhere. You will also find out that the long buses are inadequate. Most of them are not as new as they claim they are. Apart from the fact that they are not enough, there is no proper regulation and monitoring of these government drivers because they park anywhere they like on the road. People living in the Berger area have to take longer routes to get to Wuse market. There is need to reconsider this policy”, he stressed.

While addressing newsmen in Abuja on the policy, the Secretary of Transport of the FCTA, Jonathan Ivoke, had explained that the policy was formulated to transport people en-mass, among others.

He noted that only licensed high capacity buses would be allowed to provide mass transit services whereas the Araba (commercial buses) would operate at the satellite towns and other area councils of the territory.

According to him, their (Araba) operations would terminate at the various interchanges on the Kubwa axis, Yar’ Adua expressway and Nyanya interchange where they are to feed the highway with passengers for the high capacity buses to commute into the city centres.