I’ve heard gruesome tales about tragedies on Nigerian roads. The gory story a friend told me sometimes ago came to memory as I was recently reading up on fatalities on Nigerian roads. Road crashes have become normal in the country. For about two hours, my friend kept on spewing out details of the sad event. My attention was imprisoned for the period he poured out his heart and the account of what he experienced on the Lagos/Ibadan expressway. The endless grinding and gruelling gridlock on the expressway tells only an itsy-bitsy bite of its gruesome story. Trips on it have caused many lives to experience the cheapest buy. The time difference between life and death is only a split second. One minute man is bubbly with life; in the next, he is interred six feet below. That was the candid confession of my friend who was vacationing in Nigeria. Although it was a close call, the hunting cold hands of the Grim Reaper dangling on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway couldn’t hold him and his family.
He left Ibadan in the company of his wife for Lagos on an assignment. Smooth ride it was as all the occupants in the Honda Pilot SUV jabbered away enjoying the ride on the smoothened portion of the freeway before bumping into the many horrible pits in the undone portions on same. Then suddenly, somewhere in the Ogun State territory and around the stretch of road that is still being reconstructed, an oncoming high-speeding tractor-trailer coming from the Lagos end lost control. When a vehicle weighing 500 tons loses control on a raggedy road, you know that disaster lies in wait. Then the tractor-trailer ran into my friend’s vehicle dragging it a few feet close to a deep ditch. The SUV was mauled. The rampaging trailer left my friend and family alone and went for twelve other vehicles facing him. It mowed down human beings in an ugly wreck. Screams and shouts and wailings disrupted the peaceful atmosphere. Those who couldn’t yell in pain were those already silenced by the cold hands of death. For others, pain from severed limbs and battered heads was too intense to warrant a shriek as they lay in their own pool of blood motionless. But miraculously, the three occupants in my friend’s SUV escaped without a scratch but not without a shock. They stood still by the roadside unable to mutter a word for the first half-hour.
“This is how people die like that in Nigeria ooo,” he said.
According to disturbing data from Nigeria’s Federal Road Safety Corps and the National Bureau of Statistics, between 2013 and 2020 at least 41,709 persons lost their lives to road crashes in Nigeria. In the fourth quarter of 2021, more than 11,800 road traffic casualties were reported. Around 10,200 people were badly injured with many losing their limbs while 1,700 fatalities were recorded. In the accident my friend was involved, the site was gory. Much wailing and groaning for help from survivors in the mangled vehicles filled the air. My friend was born in Nigeria and had seen it all before he left for the US thirty-five years ago. On the same road, people have died in his presence. On the same road, drunk drivers are behind the wheels. On the same road, unlicensed young men had been behind big wheels and had snuffed lives out of many. On the same road, he had seen tanker trailers loaded with crude oil explode into fireballs killing people within many miles radius. On the same road, he had seen many things. But what shocked him this time was that throughout the period that the injured and half-dead motorists were squirming in pain in the middle of the road, nobody stopped to help! Everybody zoomed by. Is this deliberate heartlessness on the part of Nigerians, or that nobody wanted to get entangled in court cases involving Nigerian Police where the innocent becomes the guilty? This was strange to him.
According to my friend, sometimes later, a high-ranking police officer driving to Lagos arrived at the scene. Immediately he called road safety guys who responded within ten minutes. From now on, If anyone gossips anything negative about the Nigerian Police in the ears of my friend, he may never believe them. The commendable behaviour of this one police officer at the scene of the accident may have changed his perspective about the Nigerian Police. My friend later asked one of the Road Safety officers why nobody stopped to help the dying and injured.
“Don’t blame the people who didn’t want to stop. The police will now come and ask them to write statements about an accident they know nothing about; they will then be taken to the police station and they will be detained and asked to pay N20,000 bail money that they don’t have. If you live in Nigeria sir, you too will not stop to help ooo.”
I sat back a bit with pounds of reminisces rattling my hurting heart. Many thoughts welled up in my spirit. Then the battle raged up in my mind as I attempted trying to determine one thing that easily qualifies as a rock-bottom cheapo in Nigeria. What is that which Nigerians buy almost daily without money and without out-of-pocket price? What is that which comes as a freebie in our hospitals, a bounty in many homes and largesse on our freeways? What is that which is readily available and steadily accessible to the bally lot of us? It is ‘Death’. In this season, politicians are jostling for one political position or the other. Naira and dollar are exchanging hands in a frenetic manner. People are buying voters and voters are selling off their consciences to men who have always been the problems to the system and not the solutions. Unfortunately, the same people selling their conscience daily travel down our raggedy roads for which billions of naira have been earmarked time and time again. What happened to the funds? They went down the chutes of corruption and into private pockets. That is why death is so cheap not only on Nigerian roads but in many hospitals where the sick get sicker from lack of medical attention and nosocomial afflictions. The journey ahead of Nigeria is very far.
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