Following the retirement of the former Corp Marshal of the Federal Road Safety Corps, Boboye Oyeyemi from service on July 24, 2022, President Muhammadu Buhari approved the appointment of Dauda Biu as the Acting Corps Marshal.
The appointment was greeted with missed feelings among the Road Safety officers with many not too excited and apparently would have preferred another officer to be appointed.
A lot of them feared that it was going to be a continuation of the old order especially in the area of staff welfare which was largely unattended to. Officers worked under a very dehumanising work spaces, and Deputy Corps Commanders crammed in offices.
But, Dauda Aliu Biu was the natural successor to the throne been the next most senior officer as at the time of the retirement of Corps Marshal Boboye. So, it would have amounted to travesty of justice if somebody else was appointed ahead of him.
The acting Corps Marshal has since settled into the office knowing very well what is been expected of him. He has deliberately refused to allow all the side talks to distract him from carrying out his duties as a responsible Corps Marshal.
For the record, Dauda Biu is a very experienced Officer who joined the FRSC in 1988 and has had a fruitful career working across several formations.
He holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration (MBA) from Ahmadu Bello University and was the Assistant Corps Marshal (ACM) Finance and Accounts in 2014 before becoming the DCM in 2016.
So, he understands the challenges faced by most of the officers of the Corps, and he has immediately set out to put things in their right places. Though, there are several issues on ground to be attended to he decided to take them one at a time.
Before to his appointment, issue of promotion was a very big challenge within the Corps, with no clear cut method of promoting officers. There was a total lopsidedness in the promotion process with several officers stagnated in one rank, while the then authority dished out promotion(s) or appoint Directors at his whims and caprices without recourse to extant rules of promotion. This the new acting Corps Marshal has beamed his searchlight on by creating policy to redress those anomalies. Officers are now more optimists of getting their promotion as at when due.
Another challenge the acting Corps Marshal immediately confronted was to put right the issue of officers transfer allowances. Before now officers have had difficulties in receiving their transfer allowances as the process was so riddled with man made unnecessarily bottleneck. Biu decided to confront the evil monster by coming up with a policy that has totally eradicated the bottleneck. Now Corps members can easily access their transfer allowance.
These few steps he has so far taken seem to have created a breath of fresh air amongst the Corps, and has gone a long way to reassure even some of his strongest antagonist that he is ready to do the needful.
Why wouldn’t the critics come on board? For a man who has had the boldness to at least do what several other Marshals have not had the courage to do, just few months into his appointments, is a strong signal that there will definitely be light at the end of the tunnel.
According to word of one of the officers who obviously did not want the name on print, he said, “We thank God for the appointment of the Acting Marshal. I can tell you, the little he has done within this short period is indicative that we are in for a good ride. We pray he remain consistent and not allow sycophants to derail him. We are so happy and the moral is now so high among the officers,”
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