Last month the director general of the traffic department issued a statement about the mandatory car insurance policies. He said that his department would accept all policies issued by foreign insurance companies and that the insurance was not the monopoly of any one company. The one company he referred to, as we are well aware, is the National Company for Cooperative Insurance (NCCI).
Yet since the introduction of the new system, NCCI has been relentless in telling everybody that it is the sole company authorized to issue the mandatory policy. For whatever reasons, some newspapers have added to the general public confusion and uncertainty.
The most affected have been motorists who had already fully insured their vehicles with national companies acting as agents for foreign insurance firms. As a result of the confusion, these people believed that the policies issued to them were invalid and that they had to buy a policy from NCCI. In fact, many bought the NCCI policy, thus incurring an additional and totally unnecessary expense.
One paper carried a report, quoting officials at the traffic department as saying that policies issued by all insurance companies operating in the country are acceptable. In the same paper, NCCI’s marketing manager expressed surprise at other companies being allowed to issue policies. Then who can we, the public, believe? The traffic department or NCCI? Those papers that gave publicity to NCCI’s claims should stop confusing the public by showing some journalistic integrity and clearing the matter up once and for all.
Arab News From the Local Press 1 January 2003
