The Vehicle Inspection Office (VIO) on Thursday said that it was set to synchronise the operations of all its state commands in order to synchronise its operations across the country.
The News Agency of Nigeria reports that the Director of Service, VIO, Mr Wadata Bodinga, stated this during the inauguration of the directors national secretariat in Abuja.
Bodinga, who was represented by Mr Paul Bepeh, Director, Cross River State Command, said that the secretariate would ensure that the VIO conform with international best practices as well as to improve the standard of its services.
“With the official commissioning of this secretariat, most operations, Vehicle inspections and road traffic services will be improved.
“As an institutional body, we must ensure that our practices are of standard,” he said.
He added that the establishment of the secretariat would improve the work of its members.
“We have put in place a lot of programmes in partnership with our other sister agencies in terms of training and retraining.
“We just concluded a training of all the state commands of PRO’s and state provosts of all the commands of the federation and training will be continuous in segments in accordance with grade levels,” Bodinga said.
Mr Fidelis Nnadi, Executive Director, Accident Prevention and Rescue Initiative (APRI), who is also a consultant to VIO, stressed on the need for collaboration between the federal and state governments to assist the VIO in its work.
“We have noticed some of their shortcomings and advocating for areas where the government can come in to assist in necessary areas.
“We have discovered that some of the state governments are not really supporting the road traffic officers.
“If you go to some states, you will find some under containers and trees and this is due to lack of funding and training,” he said.
He appealed to the state governors to ensure that their state road traffic officers were well equipped with motivational funding and capacity building so that they can achieve their objective of saving the lives of road users.
”You can see now that the rate of road crashes is increasing on a daily basis and we are saying that the state governments must wake up to their responsibilities.
“It is not the job of the Federal Government to fund state agencies, but rather it is the state government who should make adequate budgetary allocation in order for VIO to complement efforts of sister agencies,” he said. (NAN)
