By Binta Fatty
The National Roads Authority has presented thousand safety vests with three hundred touchlights to the Gambia Police Force at the office of the Inspector General of Police in Banjul, on Wednesday.
The gesture is part of the efforts of the NRA to foster relations with the police as well as help them to ensure efficiency in their jobs.
Momodou Senghore, the managing director of NRA, said despite the fact that the NRA is responsible only for the engineering aspects of the roads in The Gambia, they are of the belief that road safety is everybody’s business, thus, made a priority for them to deliver the much needed materials to the police force for traffic officers as well as those responsible for night patrol.
“ We May bear the direct responsibilities of some of the activities, but then, I think road safety belongs to everybody, because it is divided into different aspects. You have engineering, which is our mandate, you have enforcement which is of course the mandate of The Gambia police force, but you have other areas as well. Sensitization, education, people need to know the basic rules of how one needs to cross the road.” He said.
Momodou Sowe, deputy inspector general of police, while thanking the NRA for the commendable gesture, called for attitudinal change to ensure safety on our roads. He highlighted that the police force is doing all it can to ensure “sanity” on the road.
“At our own level we are tailoring a new dimension of traffic management system. Vis-à-vis the first aspect of it, by completely digitalizing the whole system. But that also has to be commensurate with the existing laws that we have, so that they merge and in that there will be straight forward jacket solutions as far as our road management systems are concerned.”
