WANTED: A REGULATOR FOR URBAN HIGHWAY TRANSPORT By Chigozie Chikere
Today there is no spectacle as ridiculous as the Nigerian motoring public in one of its periodic fits of anxiety about the near anarchy state of the urban road transport sector occasioned by the absence of a regulator. Every decade or so, the government tries to reform at least one sector of the transport industry and every decade or so one sector of the industry masses its forces to work the masses into distraction. Diagnosing what is wrong with Nigeria’s road transport sector is the easy part. Even though a large chunk of Nigeria’s economy is spent on the road sector, poor traffic management, poor road capacity, lack of integration between urban planning and transport planning, dearth of high capacity public transport vehicles, weak institutional framework, and absence of a regulatory public transport framework, still plague the system nationwide with the most evident symptoms being, arbitrary pricing, fleets of wobbly and unstandardized vehicles, the menace of touts and t