ROAD CARNAGE AND THE WORTHLESS NIGERIAN LIFE

Calixthus Okoruwa charges the relevant authorities to be alive to their responsibilities

Recently, a truck conveying people from the North to Lagos was reported to have fallen off the “long bridge” on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. Dozens of people were killed in that disaster. Months ago, a truck which was reportedly “driving against traffic” on the Benin-Sagamu expressway had run into a bus conveying students of the Onabisi Onabanjo University in Ogun State, killing them all. A few years ago, as a result of the traffic snarl caused by the barricade which police officers had set up on a highway in order to extort money from drivers, the brakes of an oncoming petrol tanker failed. It rammed into the long queue of vehicles and exploded, setting dozens of cars and their occupants ablaze. Only last weekend, there is a report of the death of a minister in yet another road mishap.

In one picture, you see the gory remains of human beings strewn across the expressway. In another, you see beside the wreckage of vehicles, blood-soaked corpses on the roadside. Sometimes the famed “good Samaritans” cover the faces of such corpses with rags or even leaves.

This is the curious story of Nigeria, where life appears to be worth nothing, judging by the nature and frequency of road traffic accidents and indeed accidents of any nature including those from lowhanging electric cables that fall ever so often and electrocute human beings. But even more curious is the fact that these incidents do not seem to rouse the authorities in any way. If the victims are lucky, a governor or VIP passing by may make a quick stop at the scene, with his publicity team ensuring that good photos of the VIP assisting accident victims are taken. Or as in our present circumstances, sundry eulogies that suggest that the victim was the best thing to have happened to mankind are mouthed by VIPs. Tragically, that is typically where the story ends, until the next tragedy.

The only real tangible attempt to address the issue of road carnage in Nigeria on a national scale was that of the regime of Ibrahim Babangida who in the late 1980s, set up the Federal Roads Safety Commission (FRSC) modelled after a similar programme by the second republic governor of Oyo State, Bola Ige. Bola Ige’s programme had reportedly been very successful at reducing road carnage in Oyo State, largely on account of the zeal and innovativeness of Wole Soyinka who led it. Not unexpectedly, therefore, in setting up the FRSC, Babangida appointed Wole Soyinka as Chairman.

Under Soyinka’s oversight, the FRSC got to work very quickly and in a short while, began to tangibly entrench road safety awareness and practices in Nigeria. The FRSC officials themselves seemed to be in perpetual patrols and Nigeria’s perpetually over-speeding drivers would instinctively slow down on sighting them. Also remarkable was that Soyinka’s FRSC recruited hundreds of road safety volunteers whom it called “Special Marshalls.” These Marshalls synergised the efforts of the regular FRSC officials and were to be seen all over the country, flagging down over-speeding vehicles or even controlling traffic at notorious bedlams. All of this was done pro bono by these marshalls, many of whom were professionals ordinarily engaged in different activities in sundry spheres of life.

Even though there is hardly any data to support this, empirical evidence would suggest that the FRSC was very impactful in its early days and very visibly so. The master-stroke of recruiting “Special Marshalls” from the populace enhanced the social appeal and credibility of road safety consciousness and consequently buy-in by the public.

But as with most things Nigerian, the FRSC has

over the years tended to have lost focus. A few years ago, it decreed that all vehicle owners in Nigeria must buy reflective stickers and paste same on the rear of their vehicles. It refused to heed any alternative argument that today, vehicle rear lights come with reflectors anyway, making the reflective stickers superfluous and even grossly unsightly on vehicles. If I recall, it took the intervention of a minister to make the FRSC back down on this ridiculous “decree”. It later turned out that people with connection to the FRSC top echelon had imported container loads of these stickers and the new “all vehicles must use reflective stickers” directive by FRSC had simply been a ploy by the FRSC to help their friends dispose of these stickers profitably. Recently, the FRSC again decreed that vehicle number plates needed to be compulsorily changed across the country. Owners of motor vehicles would need to discard their number plates and pay afresh for new number plates, which it claimed would now come with “special security features.” As it turned out, the only difference between the old number plates and FRSC’s new plates was that the “new” ones had a map of Nigeria on them. Thankfully a court of law has since come to the aid of Nigeria’s hapless motorists by ruling that there is nothing wrong or illegal with using the old number plates. Today, rather than patrol our roads and help ensure that motorists adhere to the tenets of safe motoring including driving only at safe speeds, FRSC officials are more likely to be seen in street corners, obstructing the free flow of traffic under the guise of apprehending defaulting motorists. You are likely to see parked nearby, their weather-beaten pick-up trucks which appear worse than many of the vehicles they apprehend, one of the many tragic ironies of this once laudable institution.

Yes, road carnage in Nigeria is often a fallout of sundry factors including bad and unlit roads as well as the typical lackadaisical attitude by Nigerians to safety and maintenance in general. But it doesn’t take genius to realise that the bulk of road traffic accidents arise from over-speeding. The average Nigerian driver appears to have a tendency to turn any stretch of smooth road, wherever it is located, to a race track. Again, tragically, government convoys are the worst offenders in this regard, driving as if they literally own the roads.

Road carnage is at its peak today and our governments owe us a duty to address it squarely. It needs to very aggressively redress our attitudes to road safety and inculcate a new mindset that alerts Nigerians to the imperative of safety on our roads. Doing so will also mean that stiff penalties including jail terms should be paid where people wilfully risk the lives of other road users by driving badly or driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol, among others. The federal government would also need to integrate road patrolling into its tolling programme for federal roads. Such patrolling should address road safety as well as road security.

There is an imperative to re-awaken and aggressively reorganise the FRSC which seems to have gone the way of the typical rotten Nigerian behemoth. But while we await the effort of the federal government in this regard, nothing stops the various states from implementing something similar in their domains. Apart from saving the dozens of lives that are ordinarily lost daily, such initiatives will also help ensure that scarce resources including manpower in hospitals across the country are deployed to more pressing areas than victims of needless carnage on our roads. Okoruwa is a business executive in Lagos