The Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC) has condemned the planned return of the suspended ‘Park and Pay’ policy by the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA), accusing the FCT Transport Secretariat of misleading the FCT minister, Muhammad Bello, on the policy.
The AMAC leadership said the move by the FCTA would not be accepted by it as it wasn’t the administration’s duty to do so according to extant laws.
In a statement by the senior special assistant on community development to the chairman of AMAC, Yunusa Yusuf, who faulted the planned reintroduction of the policy, instead of AMAC, he described the act as unjustifiable and aimed at denying AMAC the right to get its legitimate revenue to provide social amenities for people at the grassroots of the nation’s capital city.
He said the law does not permit another body to collect or manage motorists’ activities, especially on streets and motor parks in the FCT, describing the recent announcement by the FCT transportation secretariat to reintroduce the policy as very disturbing.
Yusuf said it was also worrisome for the secretariat to be cooking up a “kangaroo” way to implement the policy, which ideally the law does not permit it to do and does not have the power to do.
“The FCTA should hands off the policy which has been planned to take off by the end of the first quarter of 2023. Because if it is allowed to return, it will affect revenue generation in the council.
“We want to clearly warn that nobody should cajole the minister to do the wrong thing. We know that the minister is law-abiding. It is clear that it is the responsibility of the local government to collect the park and pay or cooperate parking or any other name they want to fine tone or call it, so we want to tell the Transport Secretariat not to mislead the FCT administration,” it said.
