I am certain Armed Robbers,Immigration authorities,Drug Courts and even the JTF kill less people .THE National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), has said that the number of people who die in road accidents is likely to increase over the next 10 years from the current 1.3 million annually to about 1.9 million by 2020.According to the agency, the over 50 million injured victims annually will also increase except concerted efforts are made to stem the tide of road accident.Assistant Zonal Coordinator of NEMA, Mr. Apollos Jediel, made the prediction while receiving a delegation that paid a condolence visit to the zonal office over the death of the immediate past Zonal Coordinator, Hajiah Fatimah Usman with her children recently in a road mishap.He said: "These hidden road casualties and injury epidemics, which take away our agile and skilled manpower are a crisis for public health and a major contributor to the causes of poverty."Therefore, it is high time we treat it as a national emergency as we are daily being confronted by an epidemic that kills and maims on the scale of major infectious diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS."Information Officer of NEMA, Maiduguri zone, Mr. Ibrahim Farinloye, said in a statement, that Jediel listed the menace of petroleum tankers, trailers and large-and-slow moving vehicles' drivers as the major cause of road accidents in the country.Jediel stated that over 70 per cent of road accidents could be prevented, if petroleum tankers, trailers and large-slow moving vehicles' drivers adhere to section 15 of the Highway Code.According to him, the section 15 of the code states that "it is an offence for large and slow moving vehicles to allow smaller or fast moving vehicles queue behind it whenever the driver can pull over safely to make way for other vehicles".The Assistant Zonal Coordinator stated that NEMA has observed that large and slow moving vehicles do not care about the highway regulations that stress the need for them to pull-in and slow down or stop as soon as it is safe to give fast moving vehicles a chance to overtake them safely.He noted that the act by small and fast moving vehicles of queuing behind a trailer or slow moving vehicles most times lead to multiple and fatal accidents as the smaller vehicles struggle to outwit one another.Jediel also drew the attention of the Federal Road Safety Commission to the provision of Section 26 on the indiscriminate parking of fuel tankers, and other long vehicles on our highways.Non-compliance with this provision, he said, also constitutes another major obstruction to other road users as parking on both sides of the road at the same time, known as double- parking, causes hindrance to free movement of other vehicles.The nation has lost many lives and valuables because of accident at the converging spots in various part of the country.The assistant zonal coordinator therefore, urged motorists and other road users to call the attention of the security enforcement agencies' personnel to reckless driving for appropriate sanction against drivers who constitute danger to other road users.NEMA PREDICT
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