The Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) on Friday said it is suspending enforcement of road traffic rules and booking of offenders nationwide for seven days to enable it carry out awareness campaign strategy.
Briefing journalists at the commission’s headquarters in Abuja, the FRSC enlightenment officer, Jonas Agwu said the campaign strategy, which will commence on Monday, will entail the use of advocacy through persuasion and enlightenment to encourage road users to obey traffic rules without the fear of sanctions and fines.
“What we are doing for next is: can we retreat and say to Nigerians we are going to use the tool of education and see the extent to which we can get the buy in of everybody especially now that we have entered the critical season of the year which is the ember months period,” he said.
“We have said that in 2012 by God’s grace and with the support of our motoring public and our stakeholders we projected that we would be able to bring crashes to 30 percent down and fatality by 20 percent,” he added
Mr Agwu said the enlightenment programme is one of the strategies to achieve the United Nations decade of action on road safety and will be geared towards realizing this year’s target of 30% reduction in deaths on the roads.
He said using and perfecting this strategy of advocacy without enforcement would help change the indifferent attitude of Nigerians as it has been identified as the major cause of road traffic accidents in the country.
