Towards safer Nigerian roads

With the festive season just few weeks away, the 2015 ember month campaign, tagged “Operation Sanity, Drive Safely into 2016”, launched by the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) in collaboration with Guinness Nigeria plc last Thursday could not have come at a better time. This is against the backdrop of the fact that festive seasons in Nigeria usually record higher incidents of road mishaps than other periods of the year, especially because many more people like to travel during festive periods.

But beyond the festive season, the campaign comes at a time Nigeria is rated as one of the most dangerous countries to drive in the world. At the flag-off of the campaign in Benin City by the Edo State Sector Command of the FRSC, Shehu Alkali Zaki, zonal commanding officer of Zone RS5, Benin City, who represented the the corps marshal/chief executive, Boboye Oyeyemi, quoting available record, said Nigeria also ranks as the third country with the highest rate of accidents and fatalities among 193 countries in the world.

To drive home this point, Zaki further said that Nigeria recorded a total of 10,380 road traffic crashes in 2014 alone, which resulted to the death of 5,996, with 32,063 persons sustaining various degrees of injuries. He noted that currently, aside from Boko Haram insurgency, road accidents were by far the main cause of violent deaths in Nigeria.

On a wider scale, Zaki quoted a recent World Health Organisation (WHO) report which says that about 1.3 million people are killed annually through road crashes across the world, while over 50 million people are injured or disabled. Most of these incidents occur in African countries, including Nigeria.

These statistics are indeed sobering. And this is why we strongly support the FRSC ember month campaign and other strategies of the corps to mitigate road mishaps in the country, such as the compulsory installation of speed limiting device in vehicles with effect from April 1, 2016.

We, however, urge the FRSC not to limit these awareness campaigns to festive seasons alone but to also organise them at regular intervals throughout the year to continuously sensitise road users, especially commercial bus drivers, whose recklessness on the road also contributes to the high rate of accidents on the roads.

More importantly, there is no doubt that the bad shape of most Nigerian roads is a major contributory factor to the fatalities on the roads. We therefore call on the government of the day, at all levels, to take the issue of roads seriously, put the existing ones in good shape and construct new ones. But besides roads, the government must begin to develop other means of mass transportation, especially the railway, to ease the pressure on the roads.