Pehn-Pehn Ban

Recently Liberia decided to ban the motorcycle taxis that have been serving Monrovia. They are cheap, often overloaded, and if you can believe it, even less careful of traffic rules than the taxis and money-buses. The last straw seems to have been when an accident ended with a bus being burned by motorcyclists in retaliation.

As you can guess, there is more than one side to the problem. (The official exchange rate is 85 LD to the USD, but I suspect the unofficial rate is twice that.)

Garloe, who claimed he has been operating motorcycle since 2012, said the leadership has always devised schemes to collect money from them. "We are often confronted by our leaders to purchase various items such as stickers, daily tickets, identification cards from the Union."

"Think about this, we pay L\$600 for stickers, L\$50 for daily tickets that are not even monitored along with L$\500 for
identification card which many of us have paid for and are yet to receive; we do not know where the money is going," the frustrated motorcyclist said.

Quizzed as to what was responsible for the latest restrictions coming from government, he said "maybe, the union's refusal to remit money and fines collected from motorcyclists and the inability of the union to adequately monitor and supervise the sector are some of the reasons they have been banned from plying the main streets."

Adding his voice, motorcyclist Samuel Zeiguah, mirrored the issue from a very different perspective, saying that the ban will not only affect them as riders but will also affect police officers and officials of the Union who are in the habit of clamping down on poor motorcyclists.

"Police officers along with the officers of the five different unions will find it increasingly hard to regularly pay their 'susu', because of the ban. Policeman is going to seriously and surely feel it," he asserted.

I like Samuel's little sarcastic touch.

Turns out there's even more at stake here:

Mr. Bernard feared that this policy could increase the high criminal rate in the country, as many of the 'pehn-pehn' riders may revert in their ugly past, stressing: "Some of these bike riders you see here today are former combatants, and some of them are former armed robbers, who saw bike riding as a means of making livelihood.

So, if you do something that will keep them less busy, you give room to rise in the criminal rate."

Unintended consequences all over the place.

(Source for the quotes is AllAfrica)