Travel Chronicles : Owerri

On a good day, Port Harcourt to Owerri should be about a 100+ km. It should take a public bus one hour and thirty  minutes to get there and for a private vehicle, it should take less than that. But for the number of annoying and very unnecessary checkpoints on the road.
 With a throwing distance from each other, it takes more than 2 hours to travel to your destination. Haba!

You have the Police, SARS, Mopol, Army, Road Safety and others I don't even know their aim on that road, each with their own check points. Aside from the touts that fight over N50 or more to be collected from these drivers each time they pick a passenger along their road, the drivers still have to settle each check point as it passes. Why is this so?

Please, I do wonder how much they are even making as drivers, that they have to spend a good amount of their earnings on the road just for the uniformed men to allow them pass?. (Mind you, this is not part of their job)
And it's not a one off settlement o!

Each time these drivers pass that road, they have to drop at least N50 for each check point. I didn't remember to count them but if I'm not exaggerating, we passed more than 20 check points on our road, and the driver was made to settle more than 90% of them. The other ones he could escape he had to lie about giving their counterparts at the back. This is so wrong.

And with the recent lack of professionalism from these uniformed men, where we have read about shooting unarmed civilians for no known reason, the drivers are scared to even refuse them for fear of being shot at if they try to escape.

What's wrong with our institutions as a whole? Where or how can these things be corrected? It's disheartening!

Ps: picture was taken in front of the church I was sent out of in Owerri. Story for another day 🥂.