Boarding trains without tickets

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RECENTLY, the management of the Nigeria Railway Corporation (NRC) had cause to suspend members of staff who were caught negotiating with passengers on the Lagos-Ibadan train line to use the service without obtaining tickets. This action followed the circulation of a viral post by one Daramola E. Adenike (@Dara4Enjoyment) that trended for days on social media, showing the railway staff collecting money from passengers who did not obtain tickets prior to the train’s take-off. The post read in part: “On October 2, my friends and I were going back to Lagos after a weekend getaway in Ibadan. We arrived at the train station around 03:40pm. While we were walking to the entrance of the Obafemi Awolowo Train Station, Ibadan, a uniformed NRC official approached us. He asked if we had tickets and I told him we were on our way to get tickets. He then asked how many we were and I told him that we were five. He told us to follow him. We were confident we could trust him because he was wearing a uniform.”

What followed, according to the narrator, was quite sinister. His words: “He handed me over to another uniformed staff who led us to Coach 7…While pacing and looking for a staffer, I saw new people come into the train and I approached one of them. I asked him if he had a ticket and he said yes. I asked him when he got the ticket and he replied, ‘just now’. This ruled out my assumption that we were too late. I saw the uniformed staff that led us into the train and asked him about the tickets. His response was that we were a group of five, so if we went to the counter to purchase the tickets, we would not be able to sit together. I was shocked. He couldn’t even make something believable up. I went back to my seat. Few minutes after the train started moving, they started collecting cash from people on Coach 7. I paid N18,000 cash for five persons. Over 60 persons paid N3,600 each without tickets.”

Spokesman of the NRC, Mahmood Yakub, said that the corporation frowned on the action of the affected staffers. His words: “The public is invited to note that the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) seriously condemns such act of misconduct which is a flagrant disobedience to laid down rules and utter betrayal of the confidence reposed in such workers, especially at this time that the Federal Government is making all efforts at revitalising and modernising the corporation. This misconduct is regrettable and unacceptable as it negates the tenets and norms of the corporation. The corporation has therefore placed the identified erring officers on immediate suspension pending the outcome of the in-depth investigation already ongoing by the management committee set up to look into the issue. Our esteemed passengers and the general public are assured that this unwholesome attitude and image dent to the Corporation by any staff will not be tolerated nor treated with any levity.” And speaking to journalists at the Obafemi Awolowo Station in Ibadan shortly after the incident, the Managing Director of the NRC, Mr Fidet Okhiria, reiterated that the nine members of staff involved in the fraudulent practice had been suspended. While stating that it is an offence to carry an intending passenger to enter the train without having a ticket, Okhiria said the corporation had mandated staff members to check the tickets before passengers get to the departure hall and before they get to the platforms to board the trains.

This incident no doubt speaks to the pervasive corruption associated with public corporations, departments and agencies in the country. Apparently, the officials involved in the current incident had been perpetrating the fraud for some time, and were only stopped in their tracks by a social media-savvy, conscientious individual who wants things done according to the statute books. Although the erring personnel have been suspended, it is still striking that the NRC’s internal mechanisms did not uncover this fraud, and it took public outcry for the corporation to act. The corporation has consistently recorded poor returns and it is clear that corruption is at the heart of its poor performance.

The NRC ought to have computerised its operations to reduce corruptive human interventions in the processes of buying tickets. That would have made it to have a better grasp of the income stream. Of course, the fact must be acknowledged that even an automated process could still be vulnerable to human manipulation if there is no structure in place to monitor whatever is left to human action in the process, but the gains of a thoroughly computerised system far outweigh whatever might be the drawbacks. The onus is, therefore, on the leadership of the NRC to ensure better monitoring of its workings to prevent such blatant acts of corruption. In this regard, it is cheering that the NRC management has indicated that “the electronic ticketing system is being deployed and will be available on both the Lagos-Ibadan Train Service and the Warri-Itakpe Train Service (WITS) by end of October, 2023.”That is the way to go.

Needless to say, we welcome the suspension of the erring personnel but they need to be prosecuted, if found culpable, to serve as a deterrent to others in the corruption matrix. The agency needs to work hard towards making its operations largely, if not completely, corruption-free.

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