 |
| FRSC Corps Marshal B.O. Oyeyemi |
"May we never walk when the road waits, famished" – Wole Soyinka, The Road
Two major road accidents in the last week brought to the fore again the dangers that lie in wait on Nigerian roads. The Minister of State for Labour and Productivity, James Ocholi, SAN, his wife and son lost their lives in a vehicle accident that occurred on the Kaduna- Abuja road, when their Lexus SUV vehicle somersaulted, following a burst tyre and the driver's loss of control. There was also the death on the Maiduguri-Damaturu road of Major-General Yasha'u Abubakar of the Training and Operations Department of the Nigerian Army. Both accidents have been a source of enormous grief, perhaps because of the status of the persons involved, but the truth is that Nigerian roads are treacherous and deceitful, marked as they are everyday, by a harvest of deaths and sorrow.
To report that the state of the roads is bad is to proclaim the notoriously obvious, and to say that more people die every minute on our roads is to iterate that the road in Nigeria is no respecter of persons or class. In its annual reports, the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) has tried to identify the primary and secondary causes of road accidents, and in the current Ocholi case, it has offered a preliminary report, which reinforces the notion about every death being in the long run, a revelatory comment on man's existential crisis.
