The Co-Founder and Managing Director of the Truck Transit Park Limited, Mr Jama Onwubuariri, has said that within one year and three months, the platform has been able to move 850, 000 trucks from one location to another.
Onwubuariri, who disclosed this in a chat with our correspondent in Lagos recently, said that in the past, people moved their trucks only when they parted with huge amounts of money, noting that the situation had now changed.
“In the past 1 year and 3 months, we have been able to do just 150,000 trucks short of 1,000,000 in terms of actual movement of trucks. In the past, it was the case that you either needed to know someone or be willing to part with a ridiculously large sum of money to have your trucks moved from one location to the ports, the warehouses and other controlled location within Apapa,” he said.
Truck Transit Parks Limited is a traffic management system that leverages technology and man-management systems to ease traffic challenges. They provide a cost-effective, physical and technologically-secure network of truck parking services in Nigeria.
Speaking further, he said that the TTP had dropped the cost to as low as N5, 300 depending on the location.
“However, we have crashed that cost of between N150,000/N250,000 to between 10,000 and in some cases even N5,300, depending on the location that you are coming from, the particular business that you are going to do and the processes or standard operating procedures that have been put in place. All these show clearly that there is more to the traffic management system that we have put in place than just the ticketing fees. Imagine the difference between paying 250,000 to paying 25,000 to 30,000.”
The TTP boss also advised that individuals saddled with the responsibility of traffic management and enforcement should be people of integrity.
“One thing that we have emphasised to our senior partners is that an extortion-free environment is sine qua non for the success of the call-up system. The individuals and officers who are deployed to provide traffic management and enforcement duties must be people who have integrity and who are enlightened on acceptable conduct. Some of these people insist on extorting and delaying drivers needlessly, thereby leading to a build-up of traffic along the roads.”
According to him, “We have, for instance, suggested that there should be a manifest of officers on enforcement duties as well as a digital map of approved checkpoints made available on the ETO call-up system. In fact, we have a feature on the call-up system that can be used to achieve that. In addition to that, there should be proper identification of officers deployed to these approved checkpoints so that you can easily identify who is involved with reported incidents, which can be verified with the publicly available digital manifest,” he said.
