By Bernadette Franka Nambu
Car owners and council police have been on loggerheads for many years now. These car users always complain that most often, the council police requests for car documents that are not within their competence.
CNA was able to talk with some of these car owners who poured out their frustrations on the recent situation.
“We don’t have good roads to drive comfortably above 30km per hour yet, a council police will fine you for driving without putting on your safety belt. A council police will stop you and ask things like; spare tires, fire extinguishers, triangles, metallic stops. These are situations we are supposed to face only when we are driving out of town and thýey are controlled by gendarmes or road safety agents from the Ministry of Transport, not the council police. If they ask for these things and you do not have, they start threatening you with the law for you to give them a huge amount of money before they let you go,” one of the car owners told CNA.
Another driver stated that; “Instead of these council police to concentrate on what concerns them, they are busy doing the jobs of law enforcement officers. They ask for driving license, Identity cards. Yaounde is becoming one of the dirtiest towns in Cameroon, but the councils are not bothered. Their interest is to send out untrained council police to extort money from car owners,”.
“These council police are so annoying; they can stop the same car on three times in the same zone. When you are going down, they stop and repeat again when you are coming up. These people now go right into the quarters where parking spaces are not provided to block people’s tires. They claim it’s wrong parking,” another car owner explained.
