Category: Sunday magazine

The regularity of road traffic accidents involving trucks and tankers have become frighteningly high claiming innocent lives. Ibrahim Apekhade Yusuf reports.

IT’S a few minutes shy of 2pm this Monday and everywhere is already clogged with vehicles, each on five lanes on both sides with passersby and prospective passengers wearing hard grimaces on their faces and fighting real hard to withstand the torture of the sweltering heat at the bus stop.

Tagging along with the vehicles belching thick fumes are mainly young kid hawkers not just bearing all manner of wares from cold drinks to snacks, toys and other non-descript items, but who also mouth different singsongs just to attract customers. Talk of a perfect marketing mix.

The noise from the kids and adult hawkers alike, easily combine with the deafening cacophony of horns by drivers who intermittently switch off their vehicle engines to preserve fuel in frustration as passengers hiss in disgust having spent nearly over three hours at a standstill in the pure gridlock, accentuated by unruly drivers who can not adhere to simple traffic rules.

However, just within an earshot, a chaotic scene is gradually unfolding. An accident involving one of these heavily articulated vehicles and a Toyota saloon car and, naturally, an air of urgency pervades everywhere as traffic policemen, ambulance service officials, firefighters and sister agencies are all going through the motions, to make sense of the misery and human suffering arising from the mishap.

Welcome to Lagos Apapa-Oshodi Expressway, where road traffic accidents is the norm rather than the exception!

 

Crux of the matter

Nigerian roads have since gained notoriety as unarguably the most unsafe roads you can find anywhere in the world.

The reason is not far to seek. The regularity of road accidents have not only reached an alarming proportion but one that has made casualties of many out there, no thanks to the growing menace of drivers of commercial vehicles as well as drivers of articulated trucks and trailers whose devil-may-care attitude is to blame for most of auto crashes, such that the fear of trailers and trucks is now the beginning of wisdom.

 

The devil is in the detail

The media has been awash with stories of accidents on the highways in major cities across the country with grim statistics of fatalities growing every day.

Just last January, tragedy struck in the Oshodi area of Lagos State after a truck belonging to the Lord’s Chosen Charismatic Revival Church lost control, killing and injuring many.

The number of the dead ranged between 12 and 20. But police authority confirmed that only six people died, while five others were wounded.

However, the News Agency of Nigeria reported that the Oshodi Unit Commander of the Federal Road Safety Corps, Mr. Samuel Ogundayo, said 19 people were involved in the accident, adding that eight of them died.

It was, however, learnt that among the dead was an unidentified pregnant woman, whose foetus was also crushed in the accident.

It was learnt that the truck, which was laden with sand, was heading towards Mile 2 when it experienced a brake failure.

A newspaper vendor account had it that the truck ran into bystanders at the Oshodi Motor Park.

Expectedly, the incident caused traffic congestion on the Mile 2 bound-lane as bystanders and motorists rushed to the scene to assist the victims.

 

A ‘lucky’ survivor’s tale

For the few lucky survivors of road traffic accidents, life for them is never the same again as they are left mortally wounded and most times have to resign to fate as a result of the hopelessness of their case.

From the Orthopedic Hospital, Igbobi, Lagos, to several other convalescing homes spread across the length and breadth of the country, there you find people passing through one agony or the other as a result of some ghastly motor accident.

Mr. Fidelis Ekwenkwo Igbo, 58+, is one of such survivors, for whom The Nation ran an appeal fund recently.

For Igbo, a native of Owaelu Uratta in Owerri North Local Government, in Imo State, his last three years on earth has been nothing but a living hell.

Coachito, as Igbo is fondly called on account of his love for the round leather game, and has groomed a few lads now plying their trade abroad, starts and ends his day on a mattress to which he has been confined, as a result of a spinal cord injury he suffered when he was knocked down by a truck in Lagos on Monday, December 13th, 2010.

It is on the same mattress that Igbo literally sleeps, eats and takes his ‘bath’.

Worse still, he does not know when he wants to urinate or defecate, as a result of that, he has to be cleaned up regularly to minimise the unpleasant smell that oozes out from the corner of his hospital bed.

He cannot move any of his two legs and he is always in agonising pain. When his wife and other caregivers are temporarily away, he is on his own; completely helpless! Fate could not have been most unkind to this once-active haulage contractor, who now needs help to perform the simplest of tasks.

Gazing listlessly into space in his hospital bed at the Living Faith Hospital, 55 Tetlow Road, Owerri, where he has been bedridden for the past three years, a tearful Igbo recalled the sad episode of that fated Monday.

“As a transporter, December period is always a peak period of business and so on that fateful day I had resumed at my Kirikiri office at Olodi Apapa, Lagos, to perfect plans for a trip to the East, where I was expected to deliver some goods for one of my clients, when I was crushed by a truck. I passed out almost immediately only to wake up a few days later in a clinic where I was told by relatives that I was rushed to the hospital by a Good Samaritan following the accident,” he recalled.

“This month makes it three years since I have been like this. Throughout this period, I have prayed for death but it refuses to come. And to be honest with you, when I think about my life, I ask God why I did not die in the accident so that by now, I would not be here making life terrible for my wife and loved ones.

“There is absolutely nothing I can do by myself. I can neither crawl nor sit up from the mattress. Once anything is out of my reach, even for an inch, there is no way I can get it. The pain is with me throughout the day and I cannot sleep,” he said, sobbing.

 

Casualties all

To parody JP Clark’s classic poem, ‘The Casualties’, the casualties are not just those who died at the theatre of war, in this case the actual road traffic accident victims, but also include those who may have suffered one form of anguish either directly or remotely in the hands of these irresponsibly reckless drivers.

From wedding couples stuck in the usual traffic gridlock to the pregnant women going through the agonising pains of labour on the ever-busy traffic on their way to the hospital for delivery, to the men and women battling to meet up with their work-a-day-jobs but find themselves entrapped in the traffic snarls, and to average man on the street, who daily loses man-hours to the perennial traffic snarls, we are casualties all.

Mr. Olawale Ajani, a public affairs commentator, paints a more vivid scenario. “If a place is on fire and you need to move but there is some traffic on the way the whole place could be razed before help gets there. Also, if an ambulance is taking somebody to the hospital, but gets stuck in traffic, then it is impossible to get the needed help. The list is just endless.”

 

Probable causes of car accidents

A constellation of forces could be responsible for road traffic accidents, chief among which is the problem of bad roads, behaviourial attitude of the drivers, to mention but a few.

Espousing this line of view, Mr. Dotun Agbaje, a civil engineer with ATS Services Limited, Lagos, said: “Most of our roads are undulating and when you have someone behind the wheels driving with reckless abandon, probably under the influence of alcohol and weed, what do you think will happen? Your guess is as good as mine -accident.”

Pressed further, he said: “Apart from mechanical faults which do happen sometimes, most of the drivers on the highways, especially those behind the steering of these trucks, have some attitude and the law enforcement agencies are aiding and abetting them.”

Investigation by The Nation revealed that at the Truck Drivers Training Institute being run by the Lagos State government in Badagry, it was discovered that some of the drivers were blind and yet these are the same drivers that would elect to drive at night.

A source who simply gave his name as Mr. Popoola, a haulage operator in Ikorodu axis of Lagos, while sharing his view with The Nation, said, “Some of the drivers can’t read the highway codes, a majority think they are just highway decorations.”

Most of them, he stressed, are ill-equipped to drive on our roads because they lack finesse.

Mr. Rotimi Coker, a psychiatrist with the Lagos State government, also shares the same view.

Speaking on a monitored TV magazine programme recently, he recalled that most commercial drivers in the state abuse substances like alcohol, cigarette and all, which gives them the initial euphoria, but makes them lethargic at the end.

“Our commercial drivers are chronic alcohol abusers. Some of the drivers tested to cocaine as well as alcohol consumption. The result is that they suffer from palpitations, tremors, among others, after taking weed or local mixtures like kerewa, paraga, alomo, koboko, pakurumo.”

Male drivers, Coker stressed, are more into drug abuse than their female counterparts.

But thankfully, he said the detoxification centre at Itokini, Epe, has helped to detoxify people addicted to so much type of substances.

 

Profit – motive behind reckless driving

Most times, the urge to maximise profits also compels transporters to do otherwise.

Echoing similar sentiments, Chief Cyprian Arinze, Chairman/CEO, Eagle Haulage Nigeria Limited, who was unsparing in his criticism of operators and government alike, said, there was a need for a paradigm shift.

“In Apapa axis of Lagos for instance, you find tanker drivers fixing and maintaining their trucks on the highways. You see drivers fixing the axle of their trucks, or in worse case scenarios, you see them even panel-beating their trucks on the highways. This is not fair on the rest of the road users…. Originally, these bridges are not designed to carry heavy weight permanently, even abroad. But here, these drivers in a show of impunity, park their vehicles permanently on the highways, two or three lanes, and you find all manner of law enforcement agencies standing guard for them.

“Most times, they try to blackmail the government by blaming it for not providing spaces for parking… But I ask, why not even go to the government to provide you money to purchase the vehicle…What I can say is that even abroad, it is never the responsibility of government to provide parking spaces because you don’t share your profits with the members of the public, why then do you inconvenient other members of the public? The menace these reckless drivers are causing on the roads is really sickening and even though there is legislation in place for trucks to drive at certain times, this law is being observed in the breach.”

The Eagle Haulage boss further noted that: “Because of the desperation by owners to meet target, they can force the same driver to go on long haul trips consecutively for days with little or no regard for the personal safety and security of both the driver and the passengers in this case. Some drivers chew alligator pepper just to be able to wade off sleep, but sometimes you see vehicle that is no longer road worthy on the highway and you hear people say, by the grace of God, I’ll make the journey as if God is such a careless God.

“At times, motor boys collect key from their drivers to drive knowing full well such persons don’t have what it takes to drive.”

Speaking in the same vein, Mr. Silas Onchei, a transport fleet owner, waxed philosophical.

“To me, those things you see around and call accidents, I call it act of negligence, because an accident is like an emergency or a sudden development. It is what you have little or no control over,” he stressed.

Buttressing his argument, he said, “For instance, if you bought a brand new tyre and ensured that it has the right amount of pressure and everything is okay before you set out on a journey and such a tyre gets burst on the way, you can clearly say that is an accident.

“But where you deliberately get drunk and then decide to drive, you have inevitably decided to go out and kill people, only you don’t know how many body counts you will record at the end of the day. Or as an operator, you allow an untrained driver to get behind the steering. What you have done is to let loose a lion out on the streets to devour people.”

 

FRSC put on the spot

Though some stakeholders have lauded the efforts of the Commission, many are, however, of the opinion that they should be more alive to their responsibilities, in terms of enforcement of highway codes, among other measures.

Specifically, they also cited the issuance of drivers’ licences as one avenue through which the agency could sift the wheat from the chaff but raised questions about sincerity of purpose on the part of the latter.

 

Truck owners’ dilemma

The Association of Maritime Truck Owners (AMATO) has called on the federal government to float a transport bank so as to grow and sustain the sub-sector.

Chairman of the association, Chief Remi Ogungbemi, said in Lagos that the maritime truck owners needed a bank that would offer them loans.

According to him, the association will woo and seek partnership with government through available media to address the issue.

“We need a transport bank where we can have access to loans to maintain our trucks and do our business professionally. The truth is that it is only then that there can be a change in the face of all the challenges facing the sub-sector.

“But we hope that the government will not wait for us to withdraw our services before they look into our request,” he said.

He bemoaned the use of task force by government to address the issue of broken down trucks on roads, stressing that government should partner with AMATO to acquire new and durable trucks.

“Setting up a task force is not the solution. It is a mere cosmetic that cannot heal the wounds. It is only important that the necessary infrastructure be put in place.”

He said that members had continued to operate with rickety trucks because of the huge taxes imposed on them by various government agencies.

“Most of the trucks operating are in rickety condition and these things are happening because truck owners are losing their proceeds to officials who claim to work for different levels of government.

“Some officials of local governments hang around corners and fabricate offences and make the truck owners to pay different fines. Some come around with all types of stickers for different local government areas across the country. But we have started working to ensure these loopholes are blocked,” Ogungbemi said.

Corroborating Ogungbemi, Arinze said most operators are under the mercy of their drivers.

“You’ll be shocked to hear that drivers do sell goods given to them to deliver and to cover their tracks they design accidents or do one thing or the other. If you go to Area B, Panti, Ikeja Divisional Police Headquarters, there are thousands of cases of this nature.”

Speaking further, he said: “There are cases where they even run away and leave the owner to face the music alone. Without fidelity insurance, which can serve as guarantee for such cases, the owner can go to jail if he can’t pay back. So these are the things,” he said. “Besides, drivers steal diesel to resell and engage in all manner of thefts you can imagine.”

As the nation ponders over the regularity of car crashes with its attendant trademark of sorrows, tears and blood, people are lamenting, ‘when will this carnage stop?’