National Road Safety Council chairman who is also the deputy minister for Home Affairs, Hamad Masauni, named three major factors causing road accidents as human error, conditions of infrastructure and defective motor vehicles.
The minister said that a nationwide campaign to monitor traffic police and motorists who solicit and give bribes had started with immediate effect and that legal action would be taken against those who would be found engaging in graft.
He was speaking during the official launch of the campaign, which targets to reduce road accidents by 10 per cent.
The campaign is to be carried out by the Police Force, Ministry of Home Affairs and Surface and Marine Transport Regulatory Authority (Sumatra).
Masauni said that a special mechanism employed to curb corruption on roads centres on establishing the number of traffic police and drivers who disobey the Road Safety Act, thus increasing the number of road accidents.
“We cannot disclose the mechanism we have employed to track down those who engage in corruption due to security reasons… the modality of its implementation will not be disclosed to public,” said the chairman of the Council.
According to him, anyone found either seeking or receiving a bribe will be placed under custody and will not be afforded the option of paying a fine for his or her offence.
“We will not tolerate people who endanger the lives of others through actions that further their own personal interests. We must clamp down on blatant disregard of the law that causes deaths on our roads,” Masauni stressed.
Eng Masaumi said that statistics showed that since 2012 the number of road accidents had increased from 23,578 per year and reached 23,842 in 2013.
“In 2014, there was a slight decrease in road accidents to 14,360 only. The number of deaths was 3,969 in 2012 and rose by 1,043 deaths in 2013, but fell to 3,760 in 2014,” he added.
He, however, said that the government was in the process of providing road safety training to students, members of the traffic police and drivers, including bodaboda riders in order to curb the increasing number of road accidents.
For his part, Sumatra Road Safety and Environment manager Geoffrey Silanda said the authority had already finalised the process for installing car tracking systems, revealing that it would be unveiled in December, this year.“An IT specialist has worked on the devices to make sure that no one tampers with them,” he said.
Post a Comment