The Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC), the lead road safety management agency is responsible for managing and ensuring the safety of motorists and other road users on the nation’s highways. This obligates the Corps to formulate a framework and develop measures for managing safety risks, reducing crash rates, minimising fatality and severity of crash and crash-related injuries. It is also to identify areas of needed intervention and take proactive steps to prevent road crashes.
Effective road safety management requires a deep understanding of the scope of the problem and the competence to develop appropriate countermeasures for managing the consequences of road mishaps. Mechanisms must also be instituted to evaluate, select and monitor remedial measures, and to midwife expected outcomes. It calls for an admixture of accurate crash and safety data.
Crash data involves forensic collation of the facts and figures gathered at a crash scene, like the date, time, and location of an occurrence, the type of crash and vehicle involved, and the severity level and property damage. Since the data is generated in situ, it is generally considered reliable as a main source of research, and useful in monitoring trends, patterns and risk locations.
Safety data provides a comprehensive understanding of the status of safety on the roads. It is an aggregation of crash data and its derivative factors like road condition, traffic volume, designated speed limit, medical system quality and traffic law enforcement. It also records key participants’ behaviour, like the use of seat belts and phones, and drunkenness that contributed to the crash. Safety data is useful in risk assessment and prevention, diagnosing the causes and the contributory factors of crashes; selecting treatments; and developing and monitoring the performance of road safety initiatives.
In addition, it is useful for raising awareness of the magnitude of road crash-related injuries and deaths, convincing policymakers of the need for action, and guiding resource allocation.
The quality of input data is fundamental to the accuracy of research analyses and output. Incorrect data would result in faulty deductions and designing ineffective countermeasures. Therefore, to ensure the efficacy of safety reports and enhance decision-making, the underlying data must be measurable, complete, consistent, valid, timely, unique, reliable and accessible. This begins with the data collection method. To enable comparison across countries, the World Health Organisation, in its Global Status Report on Road Safety, advocates the need for standardisation or uniformity in how data is collected and presented.
The need to address the integrity of data collection and presentation methods is where road safety management presents complex challenges, especially for low-income countries, including Nigeria.
Generally, low-income countries lack adequate facilities for road safety research, resulting from limited capacity for gathering, collating, and analysing data. Policy makers rarely prioritise safer road initiatives hence they often fail to allocate adequate resources for developing relevant data. Rather than viewing the initiatives as independent budget item, oftentimes, they link or subjugate them to other development priorities like infrastructure network development, policing, and judicial reform. But then, even if policy decision or resource allocation is not controllable by the lead safety management agency, the discretion as to how to properly utilise available resources in the performance of its functions is usually controllable by the agency. This is where the necessity arises to score FRSC’s stewardship in its role as the premier road safety management agency in Nigeria.
The body, FRSC, collates statistics on road crashes in Nigeria and publishes the results in a quarter-yearly report, the FRSC Statistical Digest. The inaugural edition of the Digest was released for 1st Quarter, 2015. It debuted as a relatively comprehensive work that is rich in statistical content, format and presentation. The Editor’s Suite (Editorial Page) boasts of robust data management as one of the Corps’ cardinal plans. Now, over 10 years since the launch, the publication is anything but a citadel of robust data management or a reliable source of research into its core activities.
Analysis and comparison of the maiden edition with subsequent publications beginning with that of the 2nd Quarter, 2015, show deficiency and unreliability in content and presentation. The modern iteration has markedly departed from the tone of the maiden edition, with the latter being intellectually sloppy, replete with errors and gaps in data, and deficient in linkage and uniformity. It omits key variables for integrating crash data with explanatory datasets and fails to identify contributory factors to, or describe the outcomes and circumstances of crashes.
In the 1st Quarter, 2015 Digest, the FRSC’s nerve center, the Operations Department, declared Total War on Overloading, which it touted as “a clear indication of the efforts put in by the department in curtailing the excesses of our motorists”. To buttress its seriousness in curtailing the excesses, it renders statistical summaries of offenders and offences, and a summary of arrests on riding motorcycle without crash helmet.
The inaugural edition also provides a summary of offenders and offences, which format is repeated in the 2nd Quarter publication. In a classic example of inconsistency in collection and presentation of statistics, the 3rd and 4th Quarter editions failed to reflect the number of offenders, and showed the summary of offences only. This omission makes statistical comparison impossible.
In addition to the raw statistics, the 1st and 2nd quarter reports computed arrests arising from the Total War on Overloading on percentages basis by weighing the figures for each zone against the national total. For example, the 1st Quarter returned 3,438 combined arrests nationwide. Of this number, Gwagwalada Zone recorded the highest violators, with 751. This represented 24% of the national total. The percentage summation was omitted from the 3rd and 4th Quarter editions. While the supporting data for deriving the percentages is available, the graphical summation is helpful for consistency in presentation and ranking.
Next, the content of each quarter publication for the year differs from others. Quarters 3 and 4 reports are presented in comparative format, whereby Quarter 3 is compared with Quarters 1 and 2, and Quarter 4, with Quarters 1, 2 and 3. This comparative analysis is absent in the Quarters 1 and 2 Digests. For Quarter 1, one may argue that there was no basis for comparison since the preceding period predated the publication. The argument is not tenable because Table 11 of that edition compared Zonal NDL production with the figures for Quarter 4, 2014 – a period equally before the advent of the Digest. The reporting on the Total War could have adopted the Table 11 model and compared the statistics for Quarter 1 with those of Quarter 4, 2014. As for Quarter 2, this had the basis for comparison but totally eliminated any pretexts at the exercise.
There is a glaring omission in the Operations Department’s that must be addressed. It failed to capture or render statistics on the casualties or number of people involved in bicycle, motorcycle and tricycle-related crashes. This failure is ironic because walking and cycling across or along the roads have been identified as some of the main crash types on the world’s roads. Pedestrians, motorcyclists and cyclists who are more particularly vulnerable to road crashes and face increased risks of serious injuries and deaths are often overlooked in statistical analysis. This omission by the department increases the degree to which road traffic crashes (RTC) are considerably underreported in Nigeria. It implies a possible distortion of the outcomes of the research and can negatively impact the development of countermeasures.
Suboptimal statistical digest has consequences in the drive for providing safer roads. Inconsistencies in reporting consist one of the most serious issues affecting data quality. Studies have found a correlation between inconsistency in occurrences and crash rates. The higher the former, the higher the crash counts, and vice versa. Even though the extent and severity of misreporting vary between attributes, and the level of its impact in road safety analyses is not yet entirely known, there are indications that data recordation and reporting shortcomings potentially distort research outcomes and have a subsequent negative impact on developing countermeasures.
The enumerated deficiencies of the FRSC Statistical Digest make comparison between editions difficult, thereby eroding its utility as a credible source for research into safer roads in Nigeria. This dis-incentivises meaningful policy-making decisions and impedes investments in road safety research funding. It has wider global implications. The poor quality of the Digest makes inter-country comparison unattainable. It impedes Nigeria’s ability to attract foreign funding for road safety research and intervention and shows that the country is not ready for a seat at the table when global decisions on road safety are being taken.
•Adamu is a legal practitioner and convener of Safer Roads Action Network.
