 Welcome to The Advocate, where thought-provoking topics are discussed with no hoards barred here on Plus TV Africa. With basically quality spade by its name today, my focus is on the behavior of the last-minute officials and what their major purpose is. Tulu on the other hand speaks on reforming the justice system in Nigeria. Elijah speaks on the necessity of transparency and timeliness in leadership and finally Oluwa Kayode tells us not to blame the federal government but our state government. Sit back and after this break, we'll be here to dissect it all. Do stay with us. What's up with LASMA? First, I must state that it's super important that citizens respect officers and officials who have been assigned by relevant authorities to serve us. However, they really serve in us. If I curate all my unpleasant experiences with the officers of the Lagos State Transport Management Authority, I'm sure I'd make another cinema hit. Why have most of these LASMA officers decided to go beyond their job roles to execute what's not within their jurisdiction? Another critical issue that baffles me here is the behavior of a LASMA officer patiently waiting for you to get into trouble and then immediately surface out of the blues to get you booked. Where is the place of service by guiding citizens appropriately on the road usage? This is underlying behavior of extortion which is commiserate to their perception of you and the type of car you drive. I remember one of them jumping into my car at CMS and charging me 200,000,000 Naira and you know how it ended. When these officers are recruited and onboarded, I'm really concerned. What do they really communicate to them? Or is it just to hit the road, catch people and wicks their cars to their HQ in Oshodi? I don't even want to recount my experience at Oshodi. It was one of my most annoying experiences. Thankfully, I had to use my social capture to get out. A more serious note, when are we really going to do something about the unruly acts of these LASMA officers? The people that have been put in place to serve us and now more interested in extorting from us, this is one of the many reasons why driving in Lagos is not a pleasurable experience for me and many other people out there I want to believe. I even heard that they give them targets of defaulting vehicles and cars to a pre-hand. I don't know how true that is, but if that's anything to go by, is that even a proper KPI? If their success comes largely from this, then we can understand why they would rather wait for you to get into trouble than help you get out of trouble. Are we cursed from having a sane society that works? What's the way forward here? LASMA, KILON SHELLA. Only you can answer that. I don't have any cars. You don't have any cars. It's about the daily experience. I'm just kidding. For me, when you look at LASMA, so many things come to mind. First of all, yes, LASMA is to be blamed, but the state agency of the government that is supposed to do the tagging and putting all the signages on the streets, have they done it? Because I think, I'll give you an example, today, when I was coming, I got, okay, when I was living in VI last week, I stopped by a road. I'm not very concerned with the road on VI, so when I was driving into that street, I had to stop. Just when I was getting in, I stopped and I asked, is this one way? He said no. So I went ahead. Now, I mean, can I go through? He said yes, I went in. And when I asked, I was looking around to see all that guys, too, how they were reacting. Maybe this guy won't enter. So I went in. When I finished, came out for a while, I was going. I had to ask again, can I do a U-turn and go out this way? Or it's one way. Then he told me, only if you are driving, this is one way. Go through this way. Now, a typical legussian is in a hurry. Wouldn't stop to ask. And there is no signal, nothing showing, indicating that, no sign of anything, showing that this is one way. So you get in there and the last one official comes to you, who is probably poorly trained, who doesn't have a proper ability to, you know, not just communicate, but do analysis, read. You know, psychological, you know, be able to, you know, analyze you and see if you're doing the right thing or wrong and just assumes that you're lying or doesn't care and just arrest you. So a lot of things come into being. And I just say that they have, in a way, become a disappointment to the street, to the road or road users because they are there and they just make life miserable for many people. And what is even sad in my view is the way they won't carry out their duty. They carry it out with, in my view, less dignity. It's so sad. I imagine having a father who works a last mile and seeing him run after bosses in such manner, being insulted in such manner. There is no dignity of service. So they just work. They just go out and just do whatever it is that they feel they have to do. And that is wrong. So in the first thing is, first in first, we're talking last mile. Last mile, they need to get their acts together. They need to work better. From the leadership. From the leadership. And every other thing. I don't know, some will say, if you speak to some people in the last mile, they'll tell you that they don't have the full liberty to carry out what they want to do. That they have some, like you suggested, all this noise about controls and buttons being pressed from different areas. That's one angle. So last mile is failing in that aspect. The second one is the people themselves, the drivers, road users. We are so impatient, so rude, so intolerant at times that it will make an average road user lose his or her mind. Letting all the last mile officer whose salary is small, who is under the sun, who has been battered, and who doesn't even know what his child is going to eat because the salary is unable to. So that is why there's so much road rage between the driver and because I've been in a place, I was driving someday and an officer stopped me. When they did, the person stopped me. I was like, someone in my car said, what's he looking for? What's he looking for? I said, relax. They have the right to stop here. You don't have any excuse. When you are stopped, you must wait for them to carry out. When they are now out overstepping their boundaries, then you can't speak. And even though an officer of the law, you can't refundle an officer of the law. There's a limit to the kind of words you can use to an officer of the law. So we need to know all these things. You need to, even no matter what they do, the best way is to charge them to court. You get it. Recall it, charge them to court. That's it. You know, that's like a... That is a different okay. But this is an early one. No, I've seen people who have tried last month to court and they've won because they stood on their grounds. They had all their time. It's the people that have time. Exactly. I would like to mark my best sometimes. I don't have that kind of time. It's not the time. Elijah, we've not come to Tolu. What do you think? Well, this mother, you see, I agree with him to an extent, especially when he said he has the right to stop you. We citizens, we don't trust government. No, I don't want to use we. A lot of people don't trust government. I'm not part of the we. I don't trust government. Even though I know the air in Somalia, but I choose to trust them for the betterment of our country. But a lot of citizens don't trust the government. They don't even understand what governance is. Exactly. And then the people in governments, those people that are in government agencies, police and the last one, they themselves are abusing privileges. I don't understand this thing. Number one, like you said, uniform, I'm going to extend it now by extension to uniform person, not just last month. You don't have rights as a uniform person there. You don't have rights because you're a uniform person that you're off and doing citizen. Of course. At the other hand too, the citizen too should respect you because you're respecting the law. They said governments should be of laws rather than of men. So for the issue of last month, education is very important. They should be properly oriented and they should also learn how to communicate effectively with empathy. Let me give you an instance that happened during the lockdown, not during lockdown. I think after the lockdown, there was this couple of them, the period that they were enforcing newsmasks and all these things. It's not last month, this time right, it was police. I don't know if you saw the video trending. The woman was pregnant. She was in the car with her husband and the way that she came down for the car to ease her safe. The husband was trying to help her. The next thing was the police operated her. We are always your newsmasks. Blah, blah, blah, blah. The next thing, they refunded her and they wanted to arrest the husband. And they have children in the car. Now, let's assume the police were doing their job, but do you have to do it without wisdom, without empathy? You say that the woman is pregnant. Why did they refund it? It's not everything you must always want to arrest. You must not arrest everything. I'll give you a scenario. I remember I was watching a documentary on the internet. A woman was a very poor woman. I think it happened in the US. She was so poor, they didn't have anything to eat. So she, her child went, I don't know, she went to the, she and her child, they went to a particular shopping mall to buy something. They processed, like she stole something from the mall. And the shop owner called the police. The policeman came there and saw the woman. After assessing the whole thing, he said, is this matter, it's not matter of arrest, it's hunger. Okay, madam, he paid for what she wanted to buy, what she stole, and told her not to do it again. And let her go away. So it's not everything you must always want to arrest. It's not my intelligence. We should be wise, we should be wise. Tell you, on that note. Yeah, tell you, what's your experience with this whole Shinanigan? Yeah, you know, let's not start with my experience. Because I mean, I mean, Victor, you pretty much nailed it on the head. The problem is a problem of, of vision, you know, to start with, the vision is wrong. Once vision is wrong, the execution is wrong. You know, if someone that is supposed to protect and defend has been given the mandate to attack and punish, naturally, you know, everything else goes wrong from there. You know, to sign up to sailor claims, you know, claims you find that people have been told to protect and defend. So it's easy to feel safe when this is someone that has been, you know, mandated to protect and defend them. You know, in this case, it's different, you know, because their agenda, their objective, their vision is a bit different. So naturally, all the things that they do, just align with what they've asked them to do. I think the solution is very simple, to be quite honest. I think they need to depersonalize last month. I mean, 90% of the work that last month does can be done with technology. What is done in advanced countries, there's nothing to that work, irresistible, taking one, I mean, those things, everything can be done with technology. So in the sense of, I lose their jobs. So perhaps we want to take them to the control room and all they're doing is just, you know, printing computers. There's nothing that last month, you know, in fact, 80 to 90% of what the law enforcement does in Nigeria would help with technology. And you know, I'll speak more to it in my, when I talk about justice and the issues that, you know, we're facing with the justice system in Nigeria. Thank you so much, Tolu. All right, Tolu joins us after the break.