The introduction of online booking for intending train passengers is supposed to ease the process of physical ticket buying, which was becoming too crowdy and burdensome.

But even with the online booking system, travellers are finding it hard to buy tickets, while the process has introduced fresh challenges to intending travellers.

Some of the challenges include lack of access to portals, poor network and the hijacking of the process by racketeers, who are cashing in on the situation to make money for themselves.

One of the passengers at the Kubwa railway station, Abuja, who did not want to be named, lamented how he spent hours trying to book a ticket from midnight of Wednesday to Thursday but was not successful.

The intending passenger accused the management of the corporation of manipulating the online system in order to deny clients access to online ticket booking.

?The ticket is supposed to be available but the system would not open because that is how they have programmed it to be,? he alleged.

Describing himself as a regular visitor to Kaduna through the railway station, he said it was only when he got to the counter later on that he was able to buy the ticket ahead the 8am scheduled takeoff time.

Another regular traveller, Abdulmumini Musa Hassan, who went to the Kubwa railway station on Friday, said he tried in vain to secure an online ticket a day ahead of the journey.

?I have faced this challenge on many occasions. At times it would keep showing, ?error? or ?unavailable.? At times I would secure the ticket, but after arriving at the station, the officials at the counter would declare it as that of the previous day,? he alleged, saying he had gone through verification at the station in the past, which was supposed to qualify his online booking as hitch-free.

Passengers made to wait for hours

Most passengers who are not able to secure tickets online are left at the station standing for hours as seats hardly accommodate all at once.

Information garnered by our correspondents, however, indicates that some of the passengers are to blame for their inability to book online.

This has to do with the problem of comprehension of instructions, lack of smart phones, bank account or even GSM network in some cases.

While those that succeeded in the online booking are allowed to go into the reception after being screened, those that couldn?t are left outside the facility.

Our correspondents noticed that some of the passengers were breastfeeding mothers, the sick and elderly persons. The only available seats at the front of the reception are usually occupied by plain clothes and uniform security officials, as well as security guards attached to the station.

There is provision of a canopy and a single iron three-seater that accommodates passengers, but it has since broken and is yet to be replaced. Some of the passengers who couldn?t afford to stand for hours, with little hope that they would secure the ticket at the counter when it is opened at last, have to sit on the bare floor when they are attended to.

Sharing his experience, another traveller, Saidu Ahmed said, ?I have somebody who works there. Whenever I want to travel he books the ticket for me. Regular tickets are sold at N3,600, so I usually send him N5,000. But I have noticed something odd ? these tickets look different. For instance, the ones he gets for me don?t show the price. Official tickets usually have the price printed on them. It only shows the coach number, seat number and other train particulars. That?s all. It is different from when I used to book tickets myself using the app. When I did that, the downloaded ticket came with all the details, including how much I paid. It also displayed my NIN, my name and everything else.?

Such complaints are registered daily by passengers boarding the trains from the Idu station and Rigasa in Kaduna.

An Abuja-based traveller, Steven Ndanusa, had something similar to say as well: ?I had the option of booking online, but it was quite difficult, so I had to get an agent who works in the train station to get me the tickets.?

A resident, Rabo Kabir bitterly complained about the inconvenience experienced by passengers, saying, ?I had a nasty experience when we were travelling as a group and some of us couldn?t buy tickets online because of the new system where you have to buy 24 hours before your trip. So you have to stay awake; sometimes at 12am when the portal is open. You have to quickly buy because a lot of people there will be rushing to the portal.

?We got to the train station that day and discovered that some of us couldn?t get online, so we met a group of guys who were selling tickets. I think they were ticket racketeers. They use people?s names to go online, as well as people?s BVN and NIN to acquire tickets and sell at a higher rate.

?These activities have caused significant distress to citizens simply trying to go about their businesses. Hoarding of tickets and inflated resale prices have forced many to resort to road travel, which not only costs an additional N4,000 or N5,000. It is also slower, and in some cases, less secure.

Narrating an encounter with ticket racketeers, a traveller who would rather remain anonymous said, ?When I was coming from Kaduna to Abuja in February, I couldn?t get a ticket, so they gave me the number of someone at the station and he said I could come and he would get me a ticket. I was there but he didn?t get me a ticket; rather, he smuggled me in from the back. I had to go through the train tracks and he paired me with someone. That was how I entered. I paid extra. I paid N5,000 and that?s how I got to travel.?

He believes that while this raises serious concerns about the safety of passengers, it also questions government?s efforts to provide a smooth and transparent public transport service.

A passenger who identified himself as Sagir also said, ?I regularly travel for weekends by train from Abuja to Kaduna. But the last time I bought a ticket by myself through the app was almost five months ago. I used to book my tickets using the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) mobile app until sometime in November last year when I suddenly couldn?t receive the OTP to validate the payment and complete the process, which was not the case before. Sometimes the OTP comes almost an hour after it has expired.

?I initially thought the problem was with my bank, so I changed my ATM card, yet I still got the OTP after it expired; sometimes, I would not receive it. I then started going to the train station to buy, but it wasn?t easy because sometimes I would get there more than one hour earlier, just to make sure that I got a ticket.

?When I complained to my colleague, who also travels by train, he told me that he experiences the same problem, but he still manages to buy his ticket after several attempts.

?He said another of his colleague who had been having the same problem told him that he now gets his ticket by proxy through an NRC staff member.

?He said he normally sent N5,000 to the NRC staff to buy a regular ticket for him, which costs about N3,800. A senior colleague also told me the same thing. He was the one who gave me the man?s phone number. I called him, and surprisingly, he bought the ticket for me, obviously through the app as I noticed from the ticket.

?Based on that, on my next trip and several other occasions, I tried using the mobile app or online portal, only to be stuck with the same OTP delay problem, so I returned to the NRC staff-turned agent, and since then he has been the one buying my tickets anytime I needed to use the train.?

To better understand how the scheme works, Weekend Trust spoke to Ibrahim Ahmed, a 24-year-old suspected racketeer at the station, who gave a deeper dive into the operation.

He said, ?This is how racketeering works: there are two sets of people involved. The first set are the ones doing the main racketeering. They buy multiple tickets and hoard them until tickets are sold out on the official platform. Then they release theirs for sale, adding a profit of N2,000 to N4,000. And because of the NIN face verification process, they sometimes have to tip security officials to overlook discrepancies which also add to the cost.

?The second set of people are those who help others buy tickets online. These include people who don?t own smart-phones or don?t know how to use them, such as old people.

?A client sends a request, and in return, they get tipped. The ticket price over the counter is N3,600 while online is N3,800. With these agents, it costs around N4,500 because they spend about N4,000 buying the ticket, so they add a profit of N500 or N1,000 to make it up to N5,000.

?Those involved in the main racketeering sell for up to N7,000 or more, depending on who is buying.?

Malama Aminatu Sani, a resident of Kaduna, said she always booked her ticket to and from Abuja through her agent based at the Abuja train station two days before her travel date.

According to her, most times when a passenger tries booking online, they hardly succeed because members of staff have already hijacked the tickets.

?It is easier to book through agents than going online. Most times, if a ticket is sold at N3,600, the agent will sell it at N4,500.

?It is now a normal thing to see some of the touts operating at the station selling such tickets to those who either came late or couldn?t get a ticket online and don?t have an agent?s contact to help them book. They buy on the spot at the station,? she said.

She added that many travellers now keep agents? contacts on their phones and no longer waste time trying to book online. Instead, they reach out to agents for easier bookings.

Another Kaduna resident, Alhaji Sani Bala, corroborated the claims, saying it is disheartening how passengers are being extorted allegedly by members of staff at the station who pose as agents to sell tickets.

Alhaji Sani said he had never met the agents that usually book tickets for him in person as they only communicate via phone; and they hardly disappoint.

Another passenger, Peter Samuel, however, has a different experience. To him, the online ticketing processing has been a hitch-free experience for quite some time now.

He believes the procedure for online booking is foolproof as details such as NIN is required in the processing, while at the entry point the names on the passenger?s ticket are checked to make sure it matches with that of his NIN.

?If this is not done, the machine would not open to you at the entrance point,? he said.

NRC clears the air

The managing director of the NRC, Dr. Kayode Opeifa, in a chat with our correspondent, however, dismissed the allegation of ticket racketeering. He said that with the way the online ticketing system was designed, it is impossible for any member of staff of corporation to block the seat and prevent passengers from booking.

Opeifa said, ?There is demand and supply on the train. If you have a 1,000-space train, when 1,000 tickets have been bought, you cannot have a space. We don?t control the dashboard. It is controlled by an independent company. If it is Lagos, it is by GDS. If it is Abuja, it is by Secure ID.

?Secure ID is one of the most secured organisations in Nigeria. And if it is Warri, it is another company. It is electronic. It is like when you go to a stadium to buy football tickets, when the ticket is finished at the selling point, it is finished. Now, if some people now go and buy the ticket and leave, you don?t complain to the stadium authorities anymore. No railway staff can sell you tickets.

?There are people who have also gone on the platform; they might have bought the tickets themselves for the purpose to resell. We don?t have control over that. What we have control over is that before you buy tickets you must have NIN. Nobody buys a ticket without NIN.?

He said the management of the NRC had introduced a system where the picture of the passenger and the ticket must match before the passenger could be allowed to board the train.

He also explained that if the dashboard is showing that the seats have been fully booked, some seats would still be vacant for passengers who bought from other stations, apart from the main station.

Opeifa also disclosed that the NRC was taking steps to blacklist NINs that must have been harvested and used to purchase tickets for racketeering.

?We are blacklisting those NINs so that the day they now want to use it, they will discover that they have been blacklisted. But they might be genuine people. We are doing that at the back end.

?So it is not railway staff. People should also understand that when they say that a space is full, it is full. If you cannot connect, that is genuine. It is also true. You also know that you might have problems getting the OTP at times if your bank has a network problem,? he further explained.

The station manager at Kubwa, Shadrack Kure, said ticket racketeering had been checked by the management of the NRC for the past two years by deploying detecting machines at the entry point of the passengers.

He said each passenger was expected to present his ticket number, which must tally with the bearer?s NIN and other data before being granted entry. He further said online booking of tickets was usually open for sale to clients, starting from two days before the scheduled journey until all seats have been booked.

Kure, however, said there were tickets sold at the counter, which he described as un-accessed tickets that either failed to be booked online due to network reversal or uncompleted processing during online booking.

?We delay in selling that category of tickets, which will not be more than 8 per cent of available seats until about 30 minutes before the journey.

?There are also seats that would remain empty in any journey, those could be for passengers that succeeded in online booking but couldn?t make it to the station before the departure period. As you may know, some passengers book their tickets while abroad or another city outside Abuja and couldn?t make it to the station due to cancelled flights, gridlocks or something else, he added. (Weekend Trust)

Update news