Commander Mpinga a legendary traffic police boss, for good and bad

It was during his period that the motor vehicle picture in the city of Dar es Salaam and other regional centres changed at a rapid pace, with motorcycles rivaling commuter buses as a major means of public transport. With it opened up new avenues of breaking the law, controls.

At the same time the country was undergoing significant economic growth though on rather unequal premises, leading to corrections that may have altered somewhat the traffic picture in the city, along with memorable initiatives like revamping the outlying section of Ali Hassan Mwinyi Road – New Bagamoyo Road from Morocco to Mwenge.  

Plenty of traffic operations in clogged junctions like Ubungo, Fire, Magomeni, Mkwajuni, Morocco and up to Mwenge started to relax, making traffic police work easier. The fifth phase also altered habitual practices of traffic police.

This change of habit on the part of the traffic police could in a way lead to changes of office, despite that relocating senior police officers, like those of other ranks, is regular and made to order, as presence in one position for too long leads to building private fiefdoms. 

Whatever level at which such a phenomenon has been experienced, it is evident that a change has to come at some point so that there are new ideas and new impetus to realize projects of various sorts, like setting the bar higher for police conduct. That has to do with national, regional or traffic level.

The fact of having stayed on the top traffic post for a decade or so shows the confidence with which the top brass of the police force exhibited on Commander Mpinga, and definitely he was in charge of things in a hands-on manner, for most of the time.  

That aspect all the same included some drawbacks of its own, like hatching up plans for economic activism within the broader need for traffic discipline and complying with the law, as could be expected of the public service ethos of those days. The Traffic Police set their own revenue targets to be realized on the roads.

Around mid-2014 Commander Mpinga was telling an interviewer at a prime time television program that the traffic police expected to collect around Sh7bn from traffic offences in the course of the financial year, which he identified as required for ‘police development programs.’ 

This was ordinary at that time as various government agencies or departments set their own terms of rendering services to the public, and thus an income target pursued by traffic police wasn’t entirely disorderly, to the hearing of government at that time. Still it was surprising.

The point for observers was that the revenue target wasn’t consonant with applying the law in an objective way without prior intention to penalize a motorist without valid reason, not just in keeping with the law but also any attenuating circumstances.

In that case, the revenue target tended to put police officers at odds with probity, as they would be tied to realizing a portion of that revenue target instead of strict observation of the law, and fair handling of each case. The fact that wanton traffic police controls diminished later means this ethos was then shelved in 2016.