MIKE IKHARIALE: POLICE’S MISCONCEPTION ABOUT TINTED GLASS ON VEHICLES

For some time now, owners of vehicles with tinted glass in Nigeria have been going through a rough time with policemen who see the situation as one from where they can make up for the personal and institutional revenue losses that have been plaguing them ever since the removal of roadblocks from the nation’s highways.

Without going into the legal and policy arguments on the issue, it is obvious that some vehicles (outside the statutorily designated exceptions) are actually so opaquely tinted that any rational person seeing them would naturally think that the occupants are into something sinister. They are so darkly tinted that someone outside, no matter how close, cannot see whoever is inside. Any scrupulous law enforcement-minded person would naturally suspect that there is something fishy about such unusual vehicles.

On the other hand, most vehicles, especially vans and SUVs that are manufactured in North America, Europe and Japan come with tinted glass with the thickness graduated from the front to the rear. In all these vehicles, it is never a problem for anyone standing close to see or identify the occupants. In fact, the front passengers’ windows are generally and rightly of a lighter tint.

The reason why these cars are tinted range from the need to enhance the performance of the air-conditioning system, protection from harmful glare and the general room-type comfort of modern automobiles. They don’t have criminals and other deviants in mind and as a matter of fact, none of these factory tints will meet the demands of anyone trying to avoid visibility as they are reasonably transparent.

Unfortunately, in Nigeria we have developed a national worldview that seeks to avoid rational responses to emerging challenges by resorting to extreme and bizarre solutions that are, in most cases, counterproductive or are indicative of palpable intellectual laziness. Nowhere is this mentality more prevalent than in the areas of crime prevention and law enforcement. That is why it is often possible for the police to block road traffic with lines of vehicles stretching into kilometres just because they are “searching for criminals”. Common sense should have made it clear that only a foolish and suicidal criminal will wait patiently in a roadblock queue to be apprehended.

Little wonder therefore that no wanted person has ever been caught at such foolish and annoying checkpoints. The only possible thing happening at such places is the opportunity of the officers manning them to collect illicit tolls and unlawfully enrich themselves at the expense of security.

Specifically about tinted glass ban in Nigeria, the only reason that the authorities thought it necessary is their belief that criminals also use them to shade themselves from detection. It ought to be the rational expectation that any vehicle that is tinted has unwittingly invited the scrupulous law enforcement officer upon itself as that would be easily profiled to be something questionable. Unfortunately, that will be the car they would approach obsequiously and be asking “Oga, anything for your boys?” Their only alternative is to lump all those with tinted glass together as criminals who must then cough up something if they are to continue on their journeys.

Recently, the Senate sensing the abuses and unfair harassment that have followed the recent IG’s directive on tinted glass has initiated a legislative process intended on repealing or nullifying the Motor Vehicles (Prohibition of Tinted Glass) Act, Cap M21 Laws of the Federation (Formerly Decree 6 of 1991). A proper reading of section 1(1) of the act shows that the Police have been wilfully misinterpreting it to harass innocent road users who have the misfortune of driving vehicles with any form of tint. What the law actually prescribes is that “no person shall cause any glass fitted to a vehicle to be tinted, shaded, coloured lightly or thickly or treated in any way as to render obscure or invisible persons or objects inside the car.”

The critical issue here is not whether the tint was factory-fitted or not, it is whether it obscures or makes occupants invisible. Simple! The police know they cannot sustain their nebulous argument based on this Act before a court of law. So it is just a source of illegitimate revenue and power show.

As long as the tint on a vehicle does not render “obscure” or “invisible” whatever is inside it, there can never be a sustainable charge on it. It is not the expectation of the law that any subjective interpretation by a police officer who probably needs an eye test for his poor vision to be the conclusion as to what is obscured or ordinarily invisible. Of course, there are some wilfully tinted vehicles that do not allow for either vision or identification of occupants. These are the targets of that law and certainly not those factory-fitted ones that were tested for transparency in the general interests of traffic safety for the occupants and every other person concerned where they were made. It is inconceivable that a vehicle would pass the rigorous inspection of safety personnel in the manufacturing countries if the glass, as tinted, would lead to the inability to see those inside or for those inside not to see what is happening outside.

If the Police could just do what is right instead of the present situation of wholesale embarrassment and harassment of innocent road users, there should be no need to nullify the present statute. Perhaps the dictatorial origins of the Decree that metamorphosed into the present law are beclouding the logical and inevitable juristic perception that the demands of the rule of law under a supreme constitution have brought into being: the days of subjective interpretation of military decrees are far gone. All Nigerian laws, to be valid, must now meet the standards of objectivity, reasonableness and constitutionality. The present abusive, indiscriminate and oppressive application of the tinted cars laws by the police cannot stand the muster of judicial review and that of common sense.

It is the subsisting injustice that the current initiative before the senate on tinted glass seeks to stop. Otherwise, it is a law that was necessitated by the reality in the country but which the enforcers have discredited irretrievably. It is not a crime for a vehicle to have a tinted glass that does not obscure visibility either from outside or from inside it.