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.
