Those of my generation, that is, the baby boomers as well as those who are one or two generations younger are likely to recognise the phrase used as the title of this piece and others before it. For those who have forgotten, it was part of an advertisement which for several seasons ran on all media every year at Christmas time. It was sponsored by a plastics manufacturing firm which, like many such companies, has long become a victim of the malaise which has assailed the Nigerian manufacturing sector, is now extinct. The essence of that advertisement was to discourage people from driving too fast in the time leading up to Christmas. However, I doubt that this advert made much difference to its audience because the prevailing belief in those days and even now, is that the demons which inhabit our roads become especially spiteful and uncommonly ravenous at the period when an old year was being rung out. Beware, the dangers of the ember months! That remains a constant admonition so that all those travelling along any Nigerian road during that extended period are made aware of the dangers to which they were exposed. One would have thought that drivers were being urged to take extra care whilst using the road. Wrong! At least from the point of popular belief. The real message was that everyone was to ensure that they were in good standing with those tempestuous spirits that ruled the highways before making any trip on them. That popular jingle which became characteristic of the Christmas period of those days is now terminally quiet but its spirit lives on even as the echoes created by it continue to reverberate right up till now.
You really do not have to be acquainted with laws of Physics to appreciate that your power to control a moving vehicle diminishes as the speed at which the vehicle is moving increases. It is really a common sense thing but anyone who travels along the highways in Nigeria soon observes that this piece of common sense is only conspicuous by its absence from Nigerian roads. The contempt for caution is so prominent here that it is apparent that virtually every Nigerian who sits behind the wheel of any vehicle is instantly transformed into a spirit that is every bit as capricious if not as vicious as the spirits which in popular imagination, are supposed to inhabit the road. Nigerians are notoriously lax about keeping time for any appointment but when you see any of us driving on the road, you are given the impression that everyone is in a hurry to keep an appointment for which they whizz along the road at break neck speed. This is why accidents here are often, if not invariably described as ghastly. Many years ago, a Nigerian lady who lived in Britain was trying to describe the scene of an accident that she had seen on a British road. She was so badly shaken at the sight of the mangled vehicles at the scene of the accident that the only way she felt she could effectively convey her feelings was to describe it as a ‘Nigerian’ accident. The last time she had seen anything so horrifying was back home in Nigeria where such an appalling scene was not uncommon. Another aspect of vehicular accidents in Nigeria is that the badly mangled carcasses of the vehicle involved in an accident may remain in place, apparently forgotten long enough to be the cause of another accident. After all, the spirits are in a constant state of hunger and need to be fed. In the end therefore, those spirits conjured out of nothing in our deadly imagination are held responsible for any accident. In this scenario, the driver who may be high on some potent distilled spirits or the fumes coming off some notorious plant substance is treated like a victim of something beyond his puny human strength. You will be amazed as to how many of the drivers involved in these accidents blithely walk away unscathed from the mess they have created.
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Whilst it is true that driving at high speed can be exhilarating, it would be extremely foolish to ignore the dangers associated with it. For a start, just how fit for purpose are the vehicles which take to our roads at any time of day or night? The sober response to that query is that not many of them would be allowed out onto any European road. For example, in Britain, there is the dreaded MOT test which every vehicle above three years old has to pass before they are given a license to be on the road, any road at all. This test is repeated at every subsequent three year interval and any vehicle that fails the test at any point in time is immediately committed to a junk yard where it is permanently removed from circulation and scrapped. Here, we are charged for something called the road worthiness test. All you are required to do to pass the test is pay the prescribed fee whenever you renew your annual vehicle licence and you are good to go even if your vehicle is precariously balanced on three wheels at the time your renewed vehicle licence is being handed over to you. Given our shoddy vehicle licensing process, it is safe to assume that more than half of the vehicles plying Nigerian roads at any given time have no business being there at all as they are the potential cause of an accident just by being on the road at all. This is not taking into consideration the number of vehicles which have been in the care of a typical Nigerian mechanic for any length of time.
The Nigerian mechanic is qualified to be assigned to a special species outside the human race and that is a fact, an indisputable one. I wonder who the first Nigerian mechanic was because whoever he was, he deserves a posthumous award for sheer bravery and enterprise. How did he get it into his head to take on the spirits which were in control of the vehicle engine and be initiated into their mysteries? It is unlikely that our first mechanic underwent any formal course of training. More than a century after him, the Nigerian mechanic still lacks formal training and everything considered is on the verge of becoming an endangered species. Not long ago, a mechanic apprenticeship was well sought after. Not so anymore. A mechanic workshop is, these days, a rather lonely place, denuded as it is of aspiring mechanics. The profession, if you can call it that, has no appeal to the youths who in the absence of a tertiary education diploma prefer to become apprenticed to an internet fraudster or put the rest of us in constant danger by becoming an Okada rider. After all, he does not need any period of apprenticeship for that.
The typical Nigerian mechanic approaches his tasks by feel as he is severely limited by the simplicity of his tools and his limited knowledge of the mechanics of the engine he works on. He therefore has a cavalier attitude to his work. He is not averse to simply tossing out any defective parts or just replacing them with something that looks like the real thing as long as the vehicle he is working on can leave his workshop under its own steam. His task is not made any easier by the proliferation of the inferior or even outrightly fake replacement parts with which he carries out the needed repairs on the vehicles in his care. Today, the vast majority of vehicles on Nigerian roads have been imported after years of admittedly pampered use in Europe or the USA. For all that, they are not new, some of them being more than ten years old and no longer able to pass the fitness tests in their country of origin. These days, the spare parts needed to make those vehicles fit for service on our roads are also described as fairly used. I find it illogical that used spark plugs are preferable to brand new ones but if you put your vehicle in the hands of a mechanic in Nigeria, that is the logic you must be prepared to accept. The reality therefore is that your vehicle is not fit for the purpose of being driven on the road at any speed let alone the high speeds at which vehicles are propelled along our ricketty roads.
