Kogi State House of Assembly has been advised to repeal and reenact the law establishing the Kogi State Traffic Administration and Management Agency, KOTRAMS.
This was the submission of stakeholders who spoke during an investigative hearing carried out by the assembly in Lokoja on the alleged illegal activities of the agency.
Setting the tone for discussion at the investigative hearing, the member representing Igalamela odolu State Constituency and a member of the assembly adhoc committee on transport, Cosmos Atabor said the hearing was in view of the plethora of petitions received from the public on the activities of the agency.
He said the assembly was forced to look at the constitutionality and legality of the extant law of the agency in view of the petitions received as the law should not be seen to be obnoxious with outrageous fines currently been imposed by the agency.
A legal practitioner, Bamidele Suru, said KOTRAMS, as a traffic agency had deviated from it’s function in it’s extant law as it now does the functions of the Vehicle Inspection Officer, VIO, and the Federal Road Safety Corps,FRSC.
He said the agency ‘s extant law in some areas were ambiguous and were in conflict with the 1999 constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as amended.
Barrister Suru said he wondered why officers of the agency would arrest and prosecute as well as collect fines stressing that the imposition of fines was a judicial function that only a court can order anyone to pay a fine when he or she is found guilty after a trial in a court.
Representative of the Nigeria Bar Association, NBA, Lokoja branch, Abas Abas said operatives of the agency carried out their duties without knowing their mode of operations as well as stand on the road with uniforms without name tag.
A representative of Kogi NGO, Network, Idris Ozovehe who sought to know if the agency had secured any conviction since it’s creation in 2018 said the major function of the agency should be to ease traffic and not only for revenue purposes.
Commissioner for Transportation, Baron Okoli, said Kogi state should not be compared with other states as it was a gateway state that experiences over a thousand vehicles criss crossing the state and the work of the agency’s operatives was tasking.
Representative of the office of the Kogi State Attorney General, A. D. Bello said it was a welcome development that the assembly was revisiting the extant law of the agency as it would help create a harmonious relationship between the agency and the VIO.
In a remark, a member of the adhoc committee and member representing Olamaboro state constituency, Anthony Ujah, said the implementation of the KOTRAMA law should be done with a human face as there can be no gain in harassing those the law was meant to safe guard.