It is almost impossible for anyone travelling between towns
in Nigeria not to pass a recent road carnage. These carnages, usually auto
accidents with fatalities, are becoming more commonplace in Nigeria and are
exacerbated by the extremely low road maintenance culture that is synonymous
with every government since the Gowon years. If you are in a mass transit bus; as
you pass by the twisted chunks of metal and mangled body parts, you hear gasps
of sorrow and shouts of ‘Jesus’, as fellow travellers call on higher powers to
ensure they do not meet the same fate.
We do not really understand what is at stake when one talks
about death on and by our national highways. To make it clearer and perhaps
bring it home, I will dwell on my own personal experience. This year is yet
half way through but I have lost three people close to me to auto accidents in
the three geographical zones of Nigeria. The first was my cousin, Eddy Oha,
whose journey to Lagos from Akure where he resides with his wife and children
was truncated at Ijebu Ode when the commercial bus he was travelling somersaulted
severally. He died later that evening at the University of Ibadan teaching hospital—where
little was done to save his life.
A few weeks ago, I learnt of the death of Adolphus, a
cousin’s husband, in an auto accident as he was returning to his base in
Malunfashi from a business trip to Kano. Another shock came on 28 April when
the news of Kenechuckwu Igbo’s death via an Okada accident in Enugu reached me.
The above mentioned people represent numbers in the statistics
for those lost to all manners of auto accidents. They are numbers on a sheet of
paper to the government employee that will type them out by this year’s end,
they are numbers to the head of the FRSC that will read them out to show
whether safety on our roads have increased or decreased when 2012 is reviewed.
To people who study the charts for thesis and whatnot, they are numbers on a
page. Whether those who write them down or those who quote them remember that
these numbers represent individuals, represent dreams untimely broken,
represent tears and sorrow, is a guess that I do not think of dwelling on at
this time.
Millions of Nigerians are travelling along our highways as
you read this. Chances are that many, passing wreckages not yet removed or
recent carnages, will have tales of near misses or other gory scenes witnessed
in times past. They will wail and gnash teeth at the thought of lives lost, but
soon minds are forced to less depressing thoughts, after all, the death of a
stranger is not much of an incident—or so the old Igbo adage infers. However,
chances are, in passing vehicle, or even the unfortunate ones, there is someone
heading to the funeral of someone who died in an auto accident. To people like
the fore mentioned, the scene just witnessed poses deeper meanings, for them
the statistics represent loved ones, untimely taken, for them it is more than
just a number.
For me, the statistics stopped being a number about three
years ago when I lost my best friend to an auto accident in Kaduna. My friend,
Chimezie Okieyi, survived an earlier accident in 2003, which kept him at in a
ward at the orthopaedic hospital in Enugu for a year and maimed his left foot,
but the second one took his life—here again the hospital were helpless.
Our hospitals, our
death
Of the people we have buried in my ancestral village this
year, the vast majority died as a result of accidents, deaths I feel could have
been prevented in more ways than one.
To give a perspective, I will dwell a bit about my cousin’s
death. Eddy Oha was involved in the auto accident at about 9 am on Tuesday the
31st of January 2012. As is the Nigerian experience, good Samaritans
rushed him to a hospital, where nothing was done to save his life. It took
calls on his phone for his friends to find out about his situation. His friends
rushed from Akure to the hospital in Ijebu Ode to meet him lying on the floor
with only a drip on him, still the hospital charged N25000 for that drip, a
tranquiliser and the floor space he had occupied for about five hours before
his friends got there and they were allowed to move him to another hospital.
The debate of whether to take him to LUTH or University of Ibadan Teaching
Hospital was quickly solved on account of Lagos’s perpetual traffic jam. All
the hope of prompt attention expected for accident victims disappeared on
getting to Ibadan where the hospital officials appeared more interested in
documentation and payments than diving in an attempting to save a life. Eddy Oha,
with broken legs but no external injuries, died at about five PM, two hours
after arriving at the teaching hospital. In the two hours, he was there, only a
drip was administered to him, while we ran around, queuing up to pay for this
and that. I still believe that had instant medical attention being provided for
him, my cousin would be alive today.
A few years ago, I witnessed an instance similar to the one
that played out with my cousin when a fence collapsed on a woman in my then
neighbourhood. We had rushed the woman to Ikeja General Hospital, thinking they
would be better equipped to attempt saving her life. The woman was conscious,
talking all through the episode, but it was obvious to all that she was in deep
pain. We go to the hospital anxious and keyed for the type of haste we see in
western movies in emergencies, only to be disappointed by the lackadaisical
attitude of the hospital staff. We had to beg and plead before an attendant
made the move to take the woman from the danfo bus we came in into the
emergency ward. From there it was downhill. We were asked to go and register,
pay for x-ray and whatnot. By the time we raised the money required (it was
about 12 midnight) and the woman was wheeled into the x-ray room, she gave up
the ghost, like my cousin, a victim of the careless attitude of our hospitals,
from internal bleeding.
Our Commercial
vehicle, moving coffins
How safe are our commercial vehicles? How sane are our
drivers? How greedy are owners and operator of transport companies? How
concerned is the government and it agencies?
These questions are very important if we ever hope to save
lives on our highways. If we can find answers to why the people who are
empowered by government to oversee the cars that ply our highways, fail to see
dangers of improvised seats in commercial vehicles, then we are well on our way
to abating premature deaths on our highways.
If no law exists to prohibit nonstandard seats in commercial
vehicles in Nigeria, perhaps it is time to legislate on one. We all know how
much research goes into designing cars, and how disastrous any alteration that
goes against the design can be. People in other climes have claimed billions of
dollars in damages from car companies because of defective parts. Here, we
knowingly distort the design to create space for more passengers and make more
money.
While the greed of the owners of commercial vehicles knows
no bounds, the acquiescence of the security agents, who do little to secure the
lives they are mandated to, should not be forgotten.
Why do we insist on having these little Toyota buses and van
transport our people? We all know the bigger buses are safer and better. Is it
not time we make them the transport vehicles of choice.
Our cars are death traps, our roads are death traps, our
hospitals are no help, and the government looks on, mute to our spilled blood.
Death, it appears, is our lot in our travels everyday—unless we have the means
to fly.
That is our dilemma, our circles of inefficiencies kill our
people, and no one cares enough to make a change.
I am all about change. We have to make a difference; we have
to save lives, to force government to make the effort and accept that every
Nigerian has the right for a chance at life. We have to question why almost
everyone with internal bleeding, but without the means to go to a well-stocked
private hospital, stands little chance of surviving at any government
hospital.
To do this, I say we put a name to the statistics as I have
done above. If you have ever lost someone dear to an accident on a Nigerian
road, please comment on this post and put a name to the number. We can change
the attitude.
