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Trans­port and Civ­il Avi­a­tion Min­is­ter Eli Za­k­our says Gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sion to im­pose stiffer road traf­fic fines was dri­ven by ev­i­dence un­cov­ered af­ter tak­ing of­fice, in­sist­ing the scale of law­less­ness on the na­tion’s roads was far worse than what was un­der­stood dur­ing the elec­tion cam­paign.

Ad­dress­ing crit­i­cism over why the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress ad­min­is­tra­tion had made an about-turn on its pre-elec­tion po­si­tion not to in­crease traf­fic fines, Za­k­our said once in Gov­ern­ment, ac­cess to de­tailed re­ports and en­force­ment da­ta paint­ed a dis­turb­ing pic­ture of wide­spread in­dis­ci­pline and weak com­pli­ance with ba­sic road laws.

“On the cam­paign trail, we did not have ac­cess to the op­er­a­tional da­ta, the sta­tis­ti­cal da­ta. But since as­sum­ing of­fice, we have ac­cess to all da­ta, and the law­less­ness is worse than what we thought, so the Gov­ern­ment had to act de­ci­sive­ly,” Za­k­our said at a me­dia con­fer­ence at the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) head­quar­ters in Ch­agua­nas.