A Nation Mourns........

Finally I am able to put myself together to write about events in Nigeria in the last one week. I tried to protect myself by simply looking away from my social media pages, but the thoughts just never go away. The pain runs deep, the sorrow, the grief, the goriness. No word can describe them! My psyche is battered, my soul is tormented and my heart is tortured. Why do we deserve this horror as a people! Why?

We are all touched and bereaved by this loss of precious lives, this can and should never be accepted as the new "normal". Apologies to the religious folks, this is not the time for prayers. For way too long, we have been deceiving ourselves; acting like a particular manner will fall from heaven and right the wrongs, or bring sanity into our system. For almost 6 decades, we have been rigorously praying away our problems, instead of standing up, take our destiny in our own hands, and act like a people with a purpose. So this time around, can we spare the prayers, and begin to look deeper into our polity, and everything that is wrong with our system.

First and foremost, we need to learn how to place values on human lives and how to hold the system responsible for its failures. These series of unfortunate incidents should finally invoke some deep thoughts and galvanise a response, with the aim of permanently addressing the root causes of such tragedies. That we don’t have a blueprint for solving these problems is already bad enough, but what is rather unforgiving and more saddening is the fact, that we are either too lazy or lack the will to even take cues from models (nations) that have successfully solved these types of problems. We are so intellectually penurious to solve our problems, and we are not intelligent enough to copy how others have solved same problems. That is the shame of the Nigerian nation today.

I will not go too deep into policies, because I will end up writing a thesis, and one characteristic thing about our generation is, almost no one reads anything more than two paragraphs. Nevertheless, we have to awaken our consciousness to some obvious facts, hoping we can steer public discussions on how to solve some of these incidents leading to avoidable deaths on our roads. The earlier we realise the greater percentage of these deaths, just like the many other deaths in our country are avoidable, the better. More importantly, we need to begin to understand more deeply, the connection between these deaths, and bad leadership as well as the absence of sound and implementable policies which could have drastically reduce the number of these avoidable deaths.

The Nigeria Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) in 2017 estimated 33.7 deaths per 100,000 population annually. This means, in a country of about 180 million people, we lose about 60,660 people per year to road related accidents, and I strongly believe a lot of road fatalities are not even captured in the FRSC data. I strongly believe that the larger chunk of these deaths is avoidable, and can be reduced to the very minimum if we have sound, safe and carefully implemented road traffic policies. There is a way a country like Switzerland reduced deaths from road accident from around 1800 deaths per year in the 1970s to less than 300 deaths per year from the same cause today. That’s about 84% reduction over four decades. In the same period, Germany reduced road accident related deaths from 21,000 deaths a year in the 1970s to around 3300 deaths a year, again about 84% reduction.

Of course, there will always be unavoidable deaths from road accidents, but there are classical examples of how countries have achieved these massive reductions, and how they are still working to further reduce road related fatalities. These countries did not solve or reduced road related deaths by praying and fasting; they put minds together to address issues. Hence, it is high time we focussed on things that matter too, instead of petty and trivial. Again, manners will not fall from heaven and heaven they say, help those who help themselves. The models and blueprints are there, we only need to act like a people with a purpose.

May the souls of all the lives lost in this week of tragedy rest in perfect peace, from the very unfortunate loss of lives in the Berger road mishap to the wanton killings and carnage in Plateau state. I hope as a country, we honour the memories of the departed by finally waking up from our long slumber, and start doing the needful.

God bless Nigeria

Niyi Olarewaju