By Dr. E. F. Egbere
Imagine this: in a few weeks, a Lagos-based father of three, driving a modest Toyota Corolla with factory-fitted tinted rear windows, is stopped three times on his morning commute. Each officer demands to see a tinted glass permit—something he has never needed before. He explains that the tint came with the car, imported legally. Still, he is told that without the new permit, he risks arrest. When he asks how to get one, he is handed a handwritten phone number and quietly advised, “Pay ₦20,000 and we’ll help you fast-track it.”
This scenario has not yet played out—but under Nigeria’s revived tinted glass permit regime, it soon could. And for millions of law-abiding motorists, it will mean being treated as suspect until proven otherwise—and proving otherwise will cost time, money, and dignity.
Twice this year, the Police have shifted their enforcement deadline—first to August 12, now to October 2, 2025—blaming public pushback, technical glitches, and allegations of extortion. When a policy needs repeated postponements to quell outrage and fix basic administration, the problem is not the public; it is the policy itself.
The Motor Vehicles (Prohibition of Tinted Glass) Act was originally meant to prevent glass so dark that occupants are “obscure or invisible.” That is a reasonable safety standard. But today’s permit scheme is something else entirely: a cash-linked licence, processed through a glitchy portal, enforced on highways, and applied indiscriminately to both aftermarket films and the lighter, legally-imported factory tints in millions of vehicles. This is regulation by suspicion, not by measurable standards.
In functional jurisdictions, the rules are clear and testable. In the UK, windscreens must let through at least 75% of light, front side windows 70%. Northern Ireland uses the same thresholds, enforcing them with light meters—no permits, no annual fees. South Africa allows around 35% VLT (visible light transmission) for most side windows, keeping the windscreen clearer. In much of the United States, states apply a mix of federal safety standard 205 and their own VLT limits, again enforced with meters, not paperwork. Meet the standard, you drive. Fail it, you fix it. Simple.
Nigeria flips this logic. Instead of publishing a transparent VLT limit for windscreens and front windows, it has created an officer-mediated “licence to opacity.” If the real aim is security, issuing thousands of permits to anyone who can pay and navigate a broken system defeats the point. Criminals do not self-identify at police portals. Honest motorists do. A regime that lets bad actors buy compliance while harassing law-abiding drivers is performative, not preventive.
And it is ripe for abuse. From day one of its “digital” rollout, motorists have reported downed portals, long queues, contradictory guidance, and inexplicable demands for fresh biometric capture—despite NIN and BVN records already holding their fingerprints and facial images. Add the inevitable “facilitation” payments, and you have governance by frustration: make legal compliance hard, then monetise non-compliance at the roadside. Rights groups such as HURIWA have rightly called the regime unconstitutional and a recipe for extortion.
This is not just about inconvenience; it is about rights. Section 37 of the Constitution guarantees privacy. Section 41 guarantees freedom of movement. When ordinary travel is conditioned on recurrent payments and repeated biometric data capture, both rights are burdened. Under the Data Protection Act 2023, the state must show lawful basis, necessity, and proportionality for collecting personal data. The duplication here fails that test. No other serious jurisdiction demands fresh biometrics every time it regulates a standard vehicle feature.
Defenders argue that Nigeria’s security climate justifies extraordinary measures. But effective security is built on tools that work, not tools that merely generate receipts. A pay-for-permit system is the least efficient way to separate the innocent from the dangerous. It dilutes policing capacity into fee collection while allowing real criminals to pass with forged or fraudulently-obtained documents.
The alternative is not complicated. Publish a measurable national standard for front-glass visibility—aligned with global norms. Exempt modest factory tints that meet it. Allow narrowly-defined medical or security exemptions with strict, periodic review. Embed checks into roadworthiness tests and targeted policing, not random roadside bargaining. Equip officers with calibrated light meters, as is done worldwide. This is cheaper, faster, fairer—and far harder to game.
Nigeria’s motorists already carry the weight of multiple levies: registration, insurance, roadworthiness, and the unspoken “fees” of surviving our roads. Adding a new paywall for a factory-installed feature is not governance; it is fiscal predation. The Police themselves seem to recognise the fragility of their case, hence the repeated deadline extensions and promises of “meticulous scrutiny.” But scrutiny of what? Light transmission or the thickness of applicants’ wallets?
If the Police are serious about safety, they should abandon this permit regime and adopt enforceable technical limits. If they are serious about public trust, they should strip out the cash incentive and the arbitrary discretion that make the policy a magnet for extortion. And if they are serious about rights, they should align enforcement with constitutional protections and data privacy law.
The danger is that if Nigerians swallow this in silence, the tinted glass permit becomes the template for future extractions: today it’s your car windows, tomorrow it’s your phone, your home, or your right to move freely in your own country. Each “permit” will be another toll gate, another data grab, another erosion of the freedoms that define citizenship.
Security is a public good, not a commodity. The tinted permit regime commodifies it. Until Nigeria replaces this shakedown with a transparent, rights-compliant standard, the policy will remain what it is today: extortion in uniform.
