Okada: Fashola reconstitutes security committee

Lagos State gover-nor, Mr Babatunde Fashola has reconstituted the state's security committee to address more effectively some of the security challenges posed by commercial motorcycle operators.Inaugurating the committee in Ikeja, the governor said the number of lives lost to motorcycle accidents in the state was unacceptable, saying that the committee also had the mandate to check the problem.The News agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported that the 32-man committee, chaired by retired Deputy Inspector-General of Police (DIG), Mr Waheed Olusegun, had three weeks to submit its recommendations to the state government.Fashola charged the committee to do its work diligently, saying that statistics of motorcycle-related crimes and accidents in the state needed urgent intervention.``What we see today is that in the last two months alone ' October and November - in terms of accidents, we had 179 cases of accidents at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH).``Out of that 179, 170 of the victims were passengers. At the Toll Gate Emergency Centre, we had 41 accidents reported there on Okada, all these reports are just for two months.``In the combined reports from the 20 government hospitals that we monitored over the last two months in October and November, we had 1,039 accident cases on Okada.``Now with regard to crime, between January and now, 346 robbers were arrested on Okada. If you isolate that two months alone, October and November, it was 79 robbers on Okada. Those who got away in robbery cases on Okada were seven. Three in October and four in November.``If you look at traffic violations in October and November, we had 1,908 involving Okada in October and 1003 in November, making a total for two months of traffic violations of 2911,' he said.Fashola said the government could no longer fold its hands and watch motorcycles operators continue to undermine the peace and security of the state, saying the new committee was a step toward ending the problem.
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