INTERVIEW FEATURE
I started as a traffic warden in the 1980s and I was the first ethnic minority supervisor in the West Midlands
I raised concerns, because if you want to improve an operation, you have to have real information and I wasn’t getting that. So I went to my head of service and told him I was feeling stifled. He allowed me to go to national meetings and communicate with other people, and that formed a network for me. It was a very important stepping stone.
I got a parking ticket recently in Birmingham. I parked my car and the machine nearby wasn’t working, so I walked about 20m away to buy a ticket from another machine on a perpendicular street that featured the same charges and length of stay.
I went to the meeting and came back to see two civil enforcement officers putting a ticket on my car. I called them over and explained that the machine wasn’t working, rang the number on the machine, spoke to a lady, and found that the machine had been reported out of order. Someone should have put a note on the machine.
When you look at the whole process, they failed in so many areas. They didn’t inform the CEOs that the machine was out of order, and the CEOs shouldn’t have questioned
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me, the motorist. If people do things properly, you shouldn’t be penalised.
You have to be pushy, you have to be very direct and know where you want to go. You have to push the boundaries. I’ve only ever had three jobs, and in every job I’ve reached the top of the tree. I started as a traffic warden in the 1980s and I was the first ethnic minority supervisor in the West Midlands. I then moved into road safety for Sandwell Council as assistant road safety officer.
It was different in those days. There were two managers above me – a deputy manager and a parking manager, both were engineers. They went to all the national meetings, but never communicated anything to me.
I was born in a Land Rover in a forest in Uganda. I have one brother and four younger sisters. When I was 13 we moved to India – my father always wanted us to know more about the culture he came from, and he said no matter where you are, you adopt the way of the country you live in. In Uganda we all lived the way it was expected. We came to the UK when I was 20. I wanted to join the armed forces, but I couldn’t as you needed to have been in the country for five years. So the next best thing was to join the police. I went to the local police station and they laughed at me – they said I’d have to learn English first. It was the best thing that ever happened to me, as it made me more determined. I went and got my English ‘O’ level in just 12 months.
I learnt English ‘parrot fashion’. Some of the words I used to use were completely out of context, and I still do that at times. I don’t mind if someone corrects me, even to this day. You have to accept that the whole of
SEPTEMBER 2012 21
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