The news last week that Katsina State governor, Ibrahim Shema and his entourage, were involved in a fatal accident probably didn’t come to many as a surprise. Several of the Governor’s aides, including his police aide-de-camp, Aminu Ibrahim, perished in the accident while at least four others sustained serious injuries. But for God anything could have happened, for if the Governor’s police aide could die the way he did, it means it was a close shave for the Governor himself. Coming within days of the death, by road accident, of a prominent monarch and his wife, and several other accidents involving other ‘big’ men and women, something tells me there’s need to pay close attention to the traffic manners of some of highly placed Nigerians. For me there was nothing surprising about the accident involving Governor Shema.
This is not because there are too many deaths on our roads for one more, even when it involved a governor, not to make one lose one’s sleep. No, roads accidents are indeed gory affairs that should at any point in time awaken the humanity in us. And they, in fact, account for a huge percentage of deaths among Nigerians where hospitals as a matter of routine dedicate sections of their facilities for particular types of road accidents.
Many Nigerians die by the day on the death traps we call roads, making it sometimes difficult for one to shed the ominous feeling that there is a demon on our roads that require constant human sacrifice. But on reflection one realises whatever demons there are on our roads are of our making.
A most exacting master these demons must be if one is to go by the statistics of road accidents and deaths regularly reeled out by the police and the FRSC.
Yet, given poor data gathering methods, there is no doubt that road accidents are grossly under-reported. Therefore, many Nigerians don’t even get accounted for by the many statistics they get transformed into when crises come.
This all goes to underline the reality of the huge carnage on our roads. Evidence from relevant state authorities and eye witness accounts point to avoidable human failures, including bad roads, bad vehicles and their reckless drivers as major factors in road accidents in the country. Nigerian drivers, particularly the commercial types, are among the most dangerous that can be found anywhere.
Such huge concentration of dangerous drivers as are to be found in these parts is compounded by the terrible spaces misnamed roads on which they and pedestrians have to travel every day. It must, however, be said that the poor driving culture in Nigeria is promoted, if not initiated, by those who ought to know better.
These are people whose position in society ought to impose more responsibility and better judgement upon them, if only because they are the so-called leaders of the people. But many times they are the very ones who violate the traffic codes that constitute important part of the laws of the land they promised to uphold when they took office.
This brings me back to the unfortunate case of Governor Shema. I wouldn’t know under what circumstances the Governor travelled or the cause of the particular accident in which several of his aides died. But if one is to go by what one sees and knows of the way the VIPs in our midst conduct themselves on the road, one could do far worse than attributing road accidents to reckless driving and overspeeding.
Many times Nigerians watch helplessly as their so-called leaders drive, while in long convoys, with reckless abandon through narrow, often congested roads. Leaders, supposedly elected, governors and ‘honourables’, regularly drive on our roads as if on the way to hell. With their vehicles’ lights fully turned on and driving at such breakneck speed as would leave Michael Schumacher envious, they ride roughshod over everything and anything on their way.
As they do this their uniformed escorts wield and freely use horsewhips and batons on hapless citizens found straggling, while elected thugs practically go on rampage against the very people they claim to serve. Seeing them on the road one wonders where these public officers, elected or appointed, are rushing to when they set out on their interminable trips around the country. Is it the case that they have no wrist watch, or whatever it is they depend on to tell them the time of the day before they set out as if on a death mission?
It’s as if they have no sense of how congested our roads could be when they get on them. They are the last to set out on a trip but expect to get to their destination before anyone else. The question is What’s all the speed about? Is it to create the impression of hard work or power, or both?
Do our executive road users realise how unruly they appear when they display the kind of area boy attitude that allows their hired goons to take over the roads like common armed bandits? They drive against the flow of traffic and generally expect others to accept their disrespectful behaviour without question.
At other times, it is police officers escorting bullion vans going to or coming from banks that engage in the unwholesome display of power. Others guilty of similar behaviour are diverse classes of office holders, military officers and, increasingly, traditional rulers.
They hold everyone to ransom and act like they must and should always have the right of passage. Such reckless conduct might be responsible for the road carnage being experienced among certain categories of prominent Nigerians in recent times.
These Nigerians should realise that they not only endanger their own lives but those of other road users. If Nigeria is to evolve a responsible traffic culture, a lot of those who parade themselves as leaders would need to do more to convince the rest of us that they know what responsibility their position imposes on them.
Otherwise many of them might, by their irresponsible traffic ethic, have bought their single trip ticket to hell.