"He was flashed at 126 km / h, he will lose three points". On the highway that connects Abidjan to the seaside town of Bassam, a police roadblock applies to the letter the rules of the new license with points which came into force in Côte d'Ivoire at the beginning of March.
In the middle of the dual carriageway, an officer blows the whistle to screen the arrested vehicles.
While some drivers are surprised to have broken the law, most welcome this new measure.
"The license with points is a good initiative. There are so many speeders, so many accidents on our roads, it's disgusting. The license is the livelihood of many carriers, it's going to bring them to behave better", hopes Fernandez Depri, a surveyor.
"It will hit the drivers directly and make them responsible," says Dramane Doumbia, a transporter who travels up to 300 kilometers a day.
Inspired by the French model, each driver's license holder received on March 1 a capital of twelve points which decreases over the offenses: two points for using the telephone while driving, three points for speeding beyond 25 km/h, six points for a blood alcohol level above 0.8 g/l...
Internships at 100,000 CFA francs (152 euros), a sum higher than the minimum wage in Côte d'Ivoire, will also be set up to allow users to recover part of their capital.
On the roadblock, a small line of arrested drivers forms in front of a van stamped "Stop incivility on the road".
Inside, a computer linked to a database records the offenses and issues receipts for the offender, who can only return to the road if he pays his fine.
The machine even finds the list of previous unpaid fines and the bill can quickly reach several tens of euros.
The authorities rely on a large network of more than 200 cameras placed along the axes considered to be the most dangerous.
Drivers at fault are no longer systematically arrested, they receive their ticket by SMS and can pay online.
"Each driver must tell himself that he can be watched everywhere and that he can lose points if he does not behave well", explains Commissioner Raphaël Gossan, deputy director of the special road safety police.
By reducing physical arrests, the authorities also hope to limit "arrangements" with the police.
"The fines are notified electronically, paid directly to an account with a receipt. At this level the racketeering decreases", confirms Commissioner Gossan.
"At least we know where the money is going, because otherwise the racketeering continues," says transporter Dramane Doumbia, who hopes that this system of dematerialization of fines will accelerate.
But others, like Stéphane Losseni Soumaro, deplore the opacity of certain rules on the road. "The police verbalize as they want and put it in their pockets", plague this Abidjan taxi driver.
With this new arsenal, Côte d'Ivoire hopes to reduce the number of deaths on its roads by 50% by 2025.
A challenge that also involves renewing the car fleet and renovating the tracks because fatal accidents still regularly involve poorly maintained or overloaded buses or antediluvian trucks.
A decree that came into force in 2018 now prohibits imports of vehicles over 5 years old into Côte d'Ivoire.
Result: the number of "France, goodbye", these cars arrived at the end of the race in Europe which live a second life in Africa, visibly decreased and the small new Japanese cars at the affordable price abound in the streets of Abidjan.
"Our legislative system in terms of transport was outdated with certain texts from the 1960s. Two years ago, we decided to develop a much tougher five-year strategy which affects the quality of vehicles, drivers and infrastructure in particular" , summarizes to AFP the Minister of Transport Amadou Koné.
"With the video verbalization, the license with points, the sensitizations that we are carrying out, we think that we will have convincing results this year. We can already see that the drivers are starting to acquire good reflexes, we must continue this work", continues- he.
According to the Ministry of Transport, the number of road deaths in Côte d'Ivoire rose from 1,614 in 2021 to 1,051 last year.
28/03/2023 14:32:09 - Abidjan (AFP) - © 2023 AFP
