In the Driver, Vehicle and Licensing Authority (DVLA) today, there are two ways to become a hero of corruption: one; get smart to avoid being caught and the second is: when you are caught pay your superiors heavily to avoid handing you over to the prosecution authorities, this paper can confirm.
Barely a year after ace investigative journalist, Anas Aremeyaw Anas’ Soul Takers’ Video, which captured some officials at the DVLA engaged in open corruption, the cat is finally out of the bag, as the erring workers of at DVLA have begun spilling the beans on why they have not been handed over to the Attorney General to face the full rigours of the law.
The suspects, numbering about 60, this paper gathered, have contributed an amount of Ȼ20,000 each to management, headed by the Chief Executive Officer, Rudolf Beckly, to avoid being sacked or handed over to the state attorneys at the AG’s department for prosecution.
One of the erring workers, who sounded furious when he came to our office yesterday to spill the beans under the cover of anonymity said after paying his part of the Ȼ20,000, elements within management who assured him of his job have refused to call him back to his former position.
“I was assured that when I pay I would not only ne reinstated but given my original position, so I don’t understand why someone else is occupying it and I have been made his deputy”, he told this paper.
The suspect’s story which has been corroborated by insiders at the licensing authority gave credence to why despite the AG’s willingness to prosecute offenders, when the story broke, management refused to cooperate with them and insisted they were going to probe the matter internally.
Meanwhile, three questionnaires sent the DVLA to respond to various questions on the Soul Takers video tape had not been answered as at the time of filing this story.
As if that was not enough, now, machines needed for work are broken down according to a report published by the Daily Graphic on Tuesday 11th February, 2015.
According to the paper, some of the printing machines of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) have broken down, causing delays in the issuance of new driver’s licences since the middle of 2014 adding that“the situation has created a backlog of about 23,000 licences to be printed”.
“The Director of Driver Training, Testing and licensing of the DVLA, Mr C.W. Musah, told the Daily Graphic that it was difficult for the DVLA to get the spare parts to fix the machines.
He said the DVLA had managed to fix three out of the eight machines which were being used to print the driver’s licences.
Apart from the backlog, Mr Musah said 8,849 fresh licences had been printed, out of which 3,590 were released to DVLA offices in parts of the country last January.
For the replacement of licences, a total of 10,370 had been printed, out of which 9,540 were released to the offices of the DVLA a month ago”, the paper stated.
But an insider disclosed to this paper, that “It’s a cash-cow. Management is only hanging the dog and giving it a bad name. That is where we make the money. The strategy is to create panic that our machines are broken down so that we can do the license manually and make our money”.
Mr Musah, according to the paper, said the DVLA had decided to replace the printing machines with a new set of machines with higher printing capacity by the end of June 2015.
He said while the existing machines could print only 1,000 licences a day, the new machines to be procured would print 5,000 daily.
Besides, he said, unlike the existing machines which picked licensing information on pen drives, the new machines had Internet facilities that could pick information directly from DVLA offices at different locations.
Mr Musah said the expected changeover to a new system would not affect the data of DVLA customers and, therefore, asked the public to not be apprehensive about the new system.
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