Lagos govt arrests 11 miscreants, declares zero-tolerance for extortion of motorists

February 21, 2024

Lagos State government has declared zero tolerance for illegal extortion of residents, especially motorists, by miscreants parading themselves as enforcement officers, as it announced the arrest of 11 such fake officers who daily extort money from unsuspecting motorists at Ibeju-Lekki junction and Akodo area of the state.

Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Transportation, Mr Olawale Musa, handed down this warning on Wednesday while addressing newsmen after the enforcement exercise, declaring that the Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu administration would not fold its arms and allow some unscrupulous elements to continue to bring hardship on Lagos residents, especially at this period of economic challenges in the country.

“We have announced several times that nobody is allowed to collect money for local government on the streets of Lagos, and the government has set up a team to ensure that anybody that does that is picked up. And from that Lekki axis, we had this report, and with the aid of the Governor’s Monitoring Team, we were able to arrest 11 people who were collecting money illegally under the guise that they worked for one local government or another,” he said.

Musa said that those who were arrested would be charged to court to explain themselves, warning others who were doing things to desist, as, according to him, the state government will not relent but go “all out for them.”

“They will be charged to court to explain themselves, and I want to sound a note of warning to others that do the same thing: we will not relent; the government is all out for them; we advised them to desist because we will be on the neck of any local government that is doing this.

“If you have any issues, you call us; we will come and address them, but when you have people coming on the road on the guise that you want to have revenue at this hard time, collecting money from motorists on the road is not fair, and it is illegal in Lagos State; resist it,” the perm sec warned.

Musa reiterated that it was illegal for any local council area in the state to deploy people on the roads, saying that such an approach negated “the Lagos State Road Traffic Law, Section 18, 2018, which empowers only the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority (LASTMA) to carry out such operations on the roads.”

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