HEADLINE: Four Igbinedion Varsity lecturers die in car crash. If you think the headline is tears-evoking, what about the story. It says that the Audi 80 car bearing the four victims plunged into Ovia River along the Lagos –Ore-Benin Express road. According to eye witness, the driver of the Audi car was trying to avoid a truck whose driver took the wrong lane when the accident occurred. Though the report did not say so, regular users of the Lagos-Benin highway (deathway, more like it) know that commuters often have to resort to driving against traffic to avoid the numerous failed portions of the road.
The horrific plunge of four university teachers on Wednesday, September 5, 2012 is just half of an infernal, never-ending tale. The accident happened at about 3.30 pm on that day and according to the Federal Road Safety Commission’s (FRSC) report, local divers were only able to find the car in the river at about 7.00 pm. Rescue efforts started the following day at about 8.00am and nearly 24 hours after the accident occurred, which was at about 12 noon, local divers were able to retrieve only two of the four bodies. It is not certain whether the other two bodies were ever salvaged.
There is more to this gruesome tale of a nation in the throes of death. The photographs from the scene of the crash will surely make you stop and shed a tear for our dear mother land. You see half-clad youths in wooden canoe on the river tugging at the wreckage and another group of men including FRSC officials and perhaps, passersby on the bridge straining to pull the wrecked car out of the river with ropes and raw chimp strength. The photographs and the actions looked as ancient as shots from the black and white movies of the 1940s.
Lastly, the story says that an officer of the fire service who pleaded anonymity, said that the (Ovia River) Bridge is in a “very bad state.” And last November, a Zonal Commander of the FRSC had called for the repair of the Ovia River Bridge. According to him, “the Bridge had claimed many lives in less than three months due to accidents, many of which are avoidable.”
We want to wager that no day passes on the Lagos – Benin deathway without the blood of hapless Nigerians being spilled, a veritable libation to the gods of Nigeria’s corrupt leaders. Just last Saturday, three days after the Ovia bridge carnage, another crash occurred along this road, this time, near Sagamu and 12 commuters reportedly perished on the spot. Apart from the Lagos –Benin highway, most other roads across the country like the Lagos-Ibadan, Abuja-Suleja, Owerri-Aba-Port Harcourt, Oyo- Ilorin, Akwanga-Lafia and Enugu-Onitsha highways, to name a few, are highly accident-prone because they are in various states of dereliction.
Ironically, the same day (Wednesday, September 5,) the four university dons plunged to their ghastly end, the Federal Executive Council (FEC) was signing off on an approval for the sum of N652 billion for the repair of the phase three of the Lagos- Benin deathway. That is a huge sum; more than the entire budget of some African countries. The repairs job, under Mr. Mike Onolememen’s Ministry of Works, will be handled by Messrs RCC Nigeria Limited and it has three years to complete it. But one can almost hear Nigerians sneering at this news convinced that the road will never be done. And if done, they would wager; it would never be completed so that at the end of 2015 when we ought to have a near-perfect Lagos-Benin highway, we will remain where we are today, daily evacuating the carcasses of Nigerians from this monstrous road.
Nigerians are justified in being cynical about Onolememen’s capacity to deliver on this job. They point to his godfather, Chief Tony Anenih, who had a similar opportunity to fix the road when he held a similar position during President Olusegun Obasanjo’s time but he left the highway worse than he met it. Nobody asked questions and no accounts were given. Further, Messrs RCC does not have a great tradition of timely delivery of jobs or the best of quality. At the end of the day, we are ‘comfortably’ ensconced in the cusp of powers that do not stickle for country or the people.
Lastly, the country is also stuck with an FRSC that is today, neither a bat nor a rat; a body that has been savaged by the system and is merely going through the motion, merely faking at its duties of accident prevention. Like every other MDA, it probably never gets it revenue allocation and whatever it gets, gets mired in the system. It even lacks the capacity to capture all the accidents on our roads; and when commuters careen off the road into the deeps, they are often sentenced to eternal damnation. And ‘life’ goes on, shall we say? And where on earth is the Federal Road Maintenance Agency, FERMA in the face of vanishing highways across the country. FERMA is toady, a mere bureaucracy that has become as derelict as the federal roads it was set up to fix. It has grown into a problem.
Offshore convictions: what will Adoke do now?
Why do I have this tinge of sympathy for Mohammed Adoke, Nigeria’s Attorney-General and Minister for Justice? One ought to feel only contempt and disgust for our number one law officer who is seemingly getting lost in his own maze of judicial infamy. Look at the sorry situations: the Americans convicted their citizens who bribed some Nigerian money mongrels to win NLNG contracts in Nigeria between 1995 and 2004; the French have slammed the companies and officials who bribed Nigerians in the 2003 national identity cards contract scam while the Germans have punished Siemens for its role in a bribery scandal in Nigeria.
Not one person or company has been prosecuted, not to mention conviction in Nigeria where the criminal acts were perpetrated. Yet our Attorney-General sits on all these sordid, stinking files, unperturbed, unmoved and perhaps dishing out national honours to some of these criminals and damagers of our national honour. Our leaders of today are so, so pathetic in their inability to muster any sense of shame. What a pity.
LAST MUG: Again, national honours to all comers: after the ruckus that trailed last year’s national honours award and President Jonathan’s promise to improve the process, this year’s list released early in the week shows that nothing has changed. The award has remained a gift for a few and an expensive purchase for many Nigeria’s high and mighty who seek an icing on their mouldy cake. In other countries, it is not enough to be a ranking politician, governor, judge, academic or businessman for everyman can be promoted to a high rank, you must exhibit some acute distinction in your field to qualify for national honours.
Not so in Nigeria. So we end up honouring hundreds of people who the people know are without any honour or character and the country continues to reek of the stench of odium, criminality and corruption. We say it does not matter but it will matter someday because it all goes around and comes around.
