DECEMBER IS APPROCAHING ! THE months when Accidents occur . BE WARNED ! PICTURE ADVISORY
Road accidents have continued to claim several lives despite intense road safety campaigns. Weekly Trust reports on why the scourge has not calmed down.
At the trailer park in Gusau, a group of men were busy loading cattle into a trailer, preparing the cattle for the trip from the north to the south where they would end in the various abattoirs where they would be butchered for meat. And just as they finished loading the animals and began to leave, some twenty-three men began climbing aboard the trailer, jostling for space with the cattle. Some improvisations were introduced with long planks placed on top of the trailer to provide more space for the humans looking for opportunity to hitch a ride with the animals...
Some hours into the journey, maybe it was just minutes (eye witnesses account differ), the humans in the trailer would share the fate of the cattle: butchered, not in the abattoirs, but on the highway together with the cattle when the trailer was involved in an accident at Gidan Kano village, along Sokoto-Gusau Road. Eyewitnesses said the driver lost control when he approached a very sharp bend at high speed at Gidan Kano and could not negotiate it. The articulated vehicle skidded off the road and somersaulted. Twenty of the passengers, some of whom were hanging on the side of the trailer, died on the spot while three others died in the hospital. Sixteen other passengers sustained various degrees of injuries.
That was in December last year, precisely on a Wednesday evening on the 23rd. Just two weeks ago, another reenactment of that gory incidence where the fate of humans is indistinguishable from the fate of cattle took place in the same state, Zamfara, where 20 persons were confirmed dead and 33 others sustained serious injuries at Kaura-Namoda Local Government Area of the state. This time around, the vehicle was carrying more than 100 bags of potatoes with 42 people on board hitching a ride together with the potatoes, all coming from Sokoto. Just like the cattle driver, the potato driver was over-speeding when the trailer had a burst tire and skidded off the road, said the FRSC Assistant Corps Commander of the Kaura-Namoda Unit to newsmen, Sani Abdussamad.
The mass deaths are not confined to heavy vehicles only. On the same day, 20 kilometres from Kaura-Nomada at Kaura-Shinkafi Road, a Peugeot 505 salon car had a head-on collision with a Toyota Carina II vehicle where 11 people, mostly women and children, were burnt beyond recognition. Eight others were taken to the hospital with various degrees of injuries.
Wastage of human lives, butchered with such careless abandon by a combination of reckless driving, overloading, poor and narrow roads occur on all Nigerian highways, not just on the Sokoto-Gusau axis. The Federal Road Safety Commission, FRSC, had said recently that road accidents kill 14 people daily on Nigerian roads, totaling on average over four hundred deaths in a month. “Out of this number,” said a Commander of the Corps, Kayode Olagunju, “tanker driver-induced accidents claim at least three lives every day.”
The tanker drivers are road cousins of the trailer drivers, a law unto themselves on the road. Speeding with the latest consignment of fuel from the south to the north, just as the cattles and potatoes make the journey from the north to the south, the tanker drivers are kings of the road because of the essential importance of the commodity they transport: petroleum. Nothing embodies this pompous status more than at Tafa, a village located some few kilometers from Abuja where both shoulders of the highway have been appropriated by tanker drivers, who despite causing so many accidents and so many deaths over the years, remain untouchable. “I always remind myself that I am approaching a danger zone whenever I drive close to the village,” said Ashafa, a salon car driver at the Jabi Park in Abuja who plies the road daily on his way to convey passengers from Abuja to Kano.
Ashafa said: “Most of the tanker drivers are just boys, they think the machines are toys, something they could play with. But a trailer or tanker is not just a mere toy; the slightest carelessness will cause so much pain and anguish. So many families are robbed of breadwinners and loved ones.”
The Lokoja-Abuja Road, a link road between the north and the south, where daily hundreds of trailers, tankers, trucks, salon cars and buses hurry with passengers and goods is a hot spot that brings into relief how government failure to construct new roads and rehabilitate old ones have contributed to the statistics of deaths from road accidents in the country. One of the country’s busiest roads, it is nevertheless the narrowest. A road contract awarded since 2005 to dualise the road has mostly seen work move at the pace of a snail. But the devastation wrought by the road on human lives comes very easily and fast. In the month of October only, the road has claimed about 59 lives. Just some few months ago in July about fourty people had lost their lives at a go when an accident occurred on the road. The road has been eating lives, and still counting.
Statistics from Koton Karfe, Abaji, and Yangoji as well as Gwagwalada unit commands of the FRSC shows that 39 vehicles were involved in accidents in which 236 people sustained various degrees of injuries between the months of October till November, 12, 2010. Twenty-two out of the 39 crashes were fatal mostly occurring as a result of wrongful overtaking, a mistake which the narrow road does not forgive.
Other causes of crashes on the road from the FRSC statistics include, lost of control, tire burst, over-speeding, obstruction, fatigue, dangerous driving as well as break failure.
Abaji unit commander of the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) Mr. Joseph O. Ezeh said the state of the Abuja-Lokoja Road has contributed to some of the accidents along the road where some drivers who are in the process of trying to avoid a pothole crash into an oncoming vehicle from the opposite direction.
While the physical factors that contribute to the scourge of accidents on the roads is taking a long time in being addressed by the concerned authorities, the FRSC unit commander of Yangoji, Abdullahi Umar, has introduced a way of taming the human elements, mostly recklessness, that contributes to the spates of accidents on the road. The command has adopted a system where any driver arrested for reckless driving is taken to the command for education for 45 minutes and in the process shown pictures of corpses of accident victims on the road with the hope of using fear to educate him on the hazard of reckless driving. “These drivers never care to stop when we observe some recklessness in their driving and this is why we have devised another method,” Umar said.
On a nationwide scale, the FRSC Corps Marshal, Osita Chidoka has introduced a system of reward for Corp officers who were able to reduce the accidents in their units to the barest minimum. He said: “The commission’s gesture is to create a kind of competition among all the 36 state sector commands of the FRSC in redoubling their efforts in reducing accident and at the end reward the best command. And we are involving the state government. Infact, the state governors will be the chairmen of this committee so that they can be able to partake and as well monitor the performance of every sector command.”
It remains to be seen how far the new initiatives will go in curbing road accidents as the recklessness has somewhat been taken to a new level, especially by salon drivers who enact the human/cattle scenario by filling their car boots not only with luggages and sacks but with humans. This is after packing the front of the car with three or four passengers including the driver and the back seat with four passengers or more supported on human laps.
The culprits in this practice are the new crop of commercial drivers who favour using the Volkswagen Golf because of its speed and lightness. The practice is common along rural roads and roads linking one local government area to the other where few FRSC officers are on watch. The few police manning the various checkpoints, as usual, stretch their hands for the usual bribe and look the other way.
Salihu, a driver in Jabi Park Abuja blames the practice on passengers who often prefer to pay less than the standard amount for a ticket. “The boots cost less, sometimes half the price of a seat inside the car. In addition, the more people you carry inside the car whether in the back or front seats, the less the passengers pay compared to when you take only one passenger in front and three passengers in the back of a salon car.”
When accidents occur in such instances identifying the identities of the victims becomes a problem because such vehicles are either boarded on the highway or in illegal parks were passengers’ manifest are not kept before boarding. In Yobe for example, where two buses had a head-on collision last week where 33 people were burnt beyond recognition, identifying the victims was a big problem as their identity cards were also burnt save for one passenger whose identification survived the fire. In the end, all the victims were buried in a mass grave since relatives could not be contacted to identify their corpses.
Statistics made available to Weekly Trust by the FRSC’s Media Assistant to the Corps Marshal, Sani Abdullahi, shows that within the last three months of September, October up to 7th November this year a total number of 1,053 crashes took place. The number of vehicles involved in the crashes within the same period is 1,722; number of people killed in the crashes is 820 while the number of injured victim is 3,366.
The FRSC claims there have been an improvement. Based on its analysis it says comparison between incidence of accidents between last year and this year in a three months review shows that while 1,357 cases of road crashes were recorded in 2009, 939 were recorded within the same period in 2010, representing a reduction of 44.52 per cent. The figures also claim that while 4,167 people were injured in the same period in 2009, this year the figure dropped to 2,981, representing a reduction of 39.79 per cent.
The figures do not show improvement in the number of persons killed within the period under review. While 744 people were killed last year within the same period, this year 759 deaths were recorded, representing an increase of 1.97per cent.
The FRSC says it research has shown that the increase in fatality was as a result of more accidents involving 14-seater buses carrying 18 passengers and incidences of crashes involving tankers who claim many lives at a go.
The passengers hitching a ride with cattle and potatoes may have thought they were paying less, but as the inevitable happened they must have realized that they have sold their lives cheap....
