That thousands of Nigerians are routinely killed on roads
and highways each year is no longer shocking news to anyone in the country.
Collisions occur by the minute that keeping pace with the count is a tough job.
In fact one source has it that a Nigerian is killed on the road every 15
minutes, which works out to be four people per hour, 96 per day and 35,040 men,
women and children in a 365-day year!
If Nigeria suffered that many casualties in a shooting war with
another country in just one year we’ll all be up in arms protesting the
country’s involvement in such a life wasting misadventure. We would have been
unanimous in calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities and most likely
the resignation of the leader at the time. But here we are, living with an
inescapable reality of a steady decimation of what must be the most productive
segment of the population – a clear and present danger to the country’s
economic growth and wellbeing – and yet no one is marching on Aso Rock, ala #BringBackOurGirls or #OccupyNigeria.
Every day, it is business as usual. People go out on the
road and highways not knowing if they’ll make it safely to and from their
destinations at the end of it all. No one seems to be looking hard to see how
come we lose so many people to the simple task of road travel let alone the
accompanying property and environmental damage or billions of Naira lost to
wasted man-hours as a result, plus globally portraying the country as a place
of anything goes as far as roads and highways are concerned. No one seems to be
asking enough pointed questions about what can be done to put an end to the
carnage. No one seems to care that most of these horrible collisions can be prevented
if the government so desired or was genuinely committed to doing so.
All the 3-tiers of government remain mostly mute with the
federal tier making the occasional feeble noises after each particularly
devastating collision. There is never a clear road ahead, no systematic and
deliberate roadmap for beginning to take a decisive stab at curbing the menace.
The concerned regulatory agencies of government continue to chase the chaff
rather than the grain of road transport safety management while the body count
climbs relentlessly. A posse of officers would rather be busy asking motorists
for fire extinguishers, “C-Caution Signs”, inner lights (sic), etc. instead of
doing some useful quality work figuring out how to prevent the so called road
accidents from occurring in the first place with a determined effort at public
road safety education and enlightenment. Government and its agencies need to
step up to the plate, show the light and let the people see the way ahead
clearly. We can’t keep doing the same thing each time and expecting different
results or wishing and praying, hoping they’ll go away and that it’ll all be
alright because it won’t.
Road safety management costs time and money in thinking,
planning and execution and there must be a time-line to every aspect of the
package for it to make any meaningful impact. Nothing must be left to hang in
the cloud if a particular result is desired or expected. Government and its
functionaries must learn to update the hardware and software components of their
strategy, approach and methodology if they have a remote desire to save Nigeria
and Nigerians from the horrors of road transportation deaths and destruction.
We live in the 21st. Century like everyone else so we must employ
same tools and techniques like everyone else to deal with road safety problems,
causes and effects. There’s little sense
looking to use a Polaroid camera to snap a digital photograph. It just won’t
happen so no point in trying.
Serious economies and nations know what it means to take safety
seriously, especially road safety. That is why they leave no stone unturned to
safeguard the safety of their citizens because a safe nation is an economically
buoyant nation. It means a nation of law and order where everything is in its
place and every place has its things. Leaving safety to chance like we do
impoverishes a nation beyond compare because it promotes chaos, disorderliness
and unruly behavior on the road. Wherever safety is on the back burner,
standards and uniform measurement naturally follow. There’s no welfare for the
people where there’s no safety because every penny is under pressure to meet the
high cost of post-incident cleanup and other recovery processes, each time.
And when it comes to road safety we’re all equally exposed.
There are no special safeguards for anyone, not the poor or the rich. Not the
president, not the governor and not the unemployed, as has been evident from
the roll call of victims of previous road crashes on record. Without safety,
road safety – all that talk of economic rebirth will probably end up a pipe
dream in real terms. Unless the government finds it necessary to take a deep
rooted interest in how these killer collisions occur or are caused by
developing a blueprint for determining how motorists can safely handle motoring
hazards relating to vehicle, driver, road, traffic, weather and light
conditions that combine to deliver the most destructive motor vehicle crashes
we know. Giving it less than 100% committed attention is like toying with a
killer epidemic.
Let’s wrap this up with something for us to take in deep and
reflect upon in our quiet time. How many of you reading this blog come from a
town or village with a population of 35,000 or more people? Not very many I
would imagine but for exercise only: Just imagine waking up one morning and
hearing on global television that all the thirty-five thousand inhabitants of a
place you knew is wiped out in the course of a single calendar year. Every man,
woman and child, THINK.
Now that is how serious the road safety problem is in
Nigeria. Reason enough for the Federal Government to wake up and smell the
coffee? You bet.
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