24th April, 2013
A Lagos magistrate’s court sitting at the Kick Against Indiscipline, KAI brigade office, Alausa Secretariat, Ikeja, Lagos, southwest Nigeria, has sentenced sixteen street traders to six months imprisonment for attacking KAI officials on lawful duty at Ojota, Lagos.
They also inflicted varying degree of injuries on the KAI officials.
The street traders were sentenced without an option of fine by the presiding magistrate after all the convicts pleaded not guilty to the count charge of environment violation, obstruction of government officials from performing their lawful duty and assault occasioning harm.
The KAI brigade told the court that the convicts and others now at large, while illegally hawking their wares in the traffic on the expressway at Ojota bus stop on sighting the KAI officials who were on lawful duty swooped on them and attacked them with broken bottles and heavy stones and inflicting serious injuries on them.
They were said to have also smashed the windscreen of two of the operational vehicles of KAI. Nemesis however caught up with the convicts when an anti-robbery patrol team arrived the scene and arrested the convicts and handed them over to the KAI re-inforcement team.
After the facts of the matter were presented before the court, the magistrate subsequently sentenced them to six months imprisonment without an option of fine.
A senior KAI official who craved for anonymity told P.M.NEWS that the sentence would serve as a deterrent to other street traders who believe they could attack KAI officials with impunity and get away with it, adding that the ban on street trading on Lagos roads is still in force.
—Paul Iyoghojie