Strap and Buckle Your Child-Use A Car Restraint

Since the beginning of 2016, I have deliberately devoted more space in treating the safety value of seat belt for several reasons. The first is because of the increasing spate of deaths caused by the reluctance of front-seat passengers to buckle up. I have made copious references to some of these deaths in my piece on seat belt and the tragedy resulting from its non-use in the event of crashes. The second reason is that excessive speeding is a great challenge for the Federal Road Safety Corps. This much we have consistently alerted the public on and it explains why the campaign to commence the April 1 2016 enforcement of speed limiters in vehicles beginning with commercial vehicles, is on. The implication of increased speed is that it often makes nonsense of the value of seat belt and air-bag. I recall vividly a crash rescue conducted by my team in the FCT when I was Sector Commander near Lungi Barracks sometime in 2005.The crash involved a car in which its driver after a bottle too many at the barracks oversped and crashed into a slow moving truck on the fast lane. The five occupants in the car died on the spot. They couldn’t be saved by air bag and seat belt simply because of excessive speeding.

Statistics from the Federal Road Safety Corps shows that excessive speeding accounts for over 60 per cent of road traffic crashes recorded on our roads. We have often preached that the fact that seat belts save and the fact that you religiously use seat belt no matter the distance you drive is no excuse for you to drive above the approved speed limit. Some years ago, a very senior colleague of mine told me a pathetic story of a friend of his who died as a result of a brief error in judgement towards the seat-belt use. According to his story, his friend had gone out with a girlfriend on a certain Friday night. After some drinks, it was time to leave, and the friend obviously thought, and probably spoke it out loud, ‘well, it’s a Friday night, no pestering law enforcement agent on the road to jaw-jaw on seat-belt.’ Note that this man had hitherto been known to be highly compliant to the practice of belting up. But, unfortunately, this particular Friday took a different turn. Even when his girlfriend advised him to use his belt, the man refused. And so, tipsy, (outright drunk?) he engaged the gear and drove off. But the girlfriend, smart girl, decided to use her own seat belt. And that’s probably why she’s still alive. Because on approaching the big round-about by the Area 1 Junction in the FCT, the man had a crash and died. The girlfriend was alive to tell the story of what had transpired.

Tie this to another story involving a colleague’s brother-in-law, who is a military officer. He had just rounded off from a late night assignment, and, obviously fatigued and sleepy, was driving home without using his seatbelt. On his way, somewhere in Lagos, he lost control, ran into a pavement, bounced back to hit a stationary vehicle, which acted as a wedge to finally stop him. But not before the force had snapped his head forward to crash into the windscreen, with his chest hitting the steering. Fortunately, he is still alive to tell the story by himself. There are so many others, people we know, some of them dead, some of them alive to tell the story by themselves, some with life scaring injuries, some of them drivers, some of them passengers. The deaths, or severity of injuries, could have been avoided if only they had worn their seatbelts.

Seat belts save lives. It can’t be put simpler than that. Seatbelts have been adjudged to be the most effective traffic safety device for the prevention of death and injury in the event of a crash. Wearing a seat belt can reduce risk of crash injuries by 50per cent, according to the Global National Safety Council. In Nigeria, when the issue of seatbelt is raised, our minds immediately run to front seat occupants. It is a general consensus that seatbelts are basically for those in front. Come to think of it, it has being a widely-held belief that seatbelt use is just a necessary nuisance to avoid the greater nuisance of been stopped by an over-zealous Road Safety Official. But that is a far cry from the truth.

A seatbelt is designed to protect the occupants of a vehicle against any dangerous movement in the event of a crash or sudden stop. A seatbelt reduces the severity or even the possibility of an injury in a crash by preventing the occupants from colliding with interior elements of the vehicle or other passengers. It keeps occupants positioned correctly for maximum safety, and prevents them from being ejected from the vehicle. The following is a piece I culled from a safety article from the Oklahoma State University, and I’d like to present it just as it was written:

Imagine running as fast as you can - into a wall. You’d expect to get pretty banged up. Do you think you could stop yourself if the wall suddenly loomed up when you were two feet away from it? This is exactly the situation you face when the front of your car hits something at only 15 miles an hour.

To be Continued...