Okada and the making of Igbo landlords

When I was a student at the University of Lagos, aeons ago, a friend and I occasionally visited the National Orthopaedic Hospital, Igbobi. Our interest was entirely morbid. Well, not entirely. There was some curiosity too. 

We went there to see the Igbobi landlords. These were victims of motorcycle accidents; most with broken heads and limbs. On their hospital beds, their injured legs in a cast were hoisted above their beds. Some had heavily bandaged heads. You saw their black eyes almost peeping vacantly through the holes made for them by the nurses who bandaged their heads. Not what you would expect to see of a land lord.

Their healing process was long – and obviously painful. They spent months in the hospital. Lagosians with their inimitable sense of humour, nicknamed them “Igbobi land lords.” Motorcyclists in those days were young men who had made the welcome leap from the bicycle to the new level of social importance. The motorcycle owner was in the middle between the bicycle owner and the car owner. There were not many of them because people do not make the leap in such matters in large numbers. Despite their small number, they did manage to draw undue public attention to themselves because of the rate of accidents involving them.

My friend and I have not visited the hospital for many, many years. My guess is that there must be many more landlords there, not only at Igbobi but in all our major hospitals – for one good reason. There are more motorcyclists now. The motorcycle has made the quantum leap as an important commercial enterprise. It has become perhaps the most ubiquitous commercial public transportation system throughout the country today. We know them as okada. They are also perhaps the most dependable means of transportation for those who count their wealth in over-used and smelly Naira notes. Try, if you will, to imagine what life would be for thousands of people in our towns and cities without okada to meet their transportation needs.

Okada is a creative response to the transportation needs of our people. The failure of our public transportation system had made life nasty for lots and lots of people. But the okada is also the shortest way to change the social status of its rider or its passenger, as in from a nobody to Igbobi land lord. It is difficult to see okada men and women on the roads and not be bothered by the fact that they have little regard for their own lives, the lives of their passengers and the lives of other road users. They have a death wish. They wish death for themselves and for others. They do not know and, therefore, cannot be expected to observe simple rules of road use. They ride at top speed against traffic on express ways. You watch them weave between vehicles, cut dangerously in front of vehicles, and do everything but act in a manner that suggests their lives and other people’s lives matter to them – and you know we have some serious problems here as a nation. They have a menacing solidarity among themselves. If an okada man has an accident with a motorist, his colleagues are in there in large numbers in a jiffy to menace and intimidate the poor motorist who is not at fault. 

The National Bureau of Statistics said August 28 that 12,797 Nigerians were killed in road accidents in 30 months. I wonder if that figure included people killed in avoidable okada accidents during that period. Not likely. We all know that hundreds of people are killed or maimed in okada accidents almost every day. There is no reason why this should continue to be so. The lives of people – the poor and the rich alike – matter. It is the business of governments to take necessary steps to make our lives safe in whatever may be the transportation system we depend on.

We must accept the inevitable. We are bound to live with the okada men and women for as long as the politicians place a higher premium on capturing and retaining power than on using our collective wealth to do those things that would make life more bearable for the hard-pressed. In a rather perverse way, I admire the okada operators as enterprising young men and women. They are as important as the next private motor transport owner. Thousands of our youths take to it to fend for themselves. It is a very good thing.

Two important points must be made here. One, since okada is a business, it must be regulated like all businesses to make their operators accept their social and other responsibilities. Okada men and women have become a law unto themselves. They do not respect the rights of other road users. We must register them and pledge them to the basics of their business and social responsibilities. 

Two, I accept that okada is useful. But it need not be dangerous. Our governments and the police have been lax in enforcing laws and regulations dealing with okada. It is mandatory for the state to make okada safe for its riders, its passengers and other road users. Okada operators are not even licensed. It should be possible to register and license them and monitor their operations. When policemen stop them, they abandon their machines and take off to escape the cold hands of the law. 

The history of governments’ response to that challenge has been spotty at best. During the Obasanjo military administration, state governments issued edicts making it mandatory for motor cyclists and their passengers to wear helmets to protect against head injuries in an accident. I recall that in a misguided ambition to make himself the popular governor of the people, the late Alhaji Abubakar Rimi, governor of Kano State, scrapped the edict in his state as soon as he took office in October 1979. Other state governors soon followed. I do not think that helmet-wearing was punitive. It is the practice elsewhere in the world. Think of the lives that could be saved from the simple act of wearing helmets to ride okada. 

Tunde Fashola as governor of Lagos State, banned okada from express ways and major streets in the Lagos metropolis. The law was observed for a few days and forgotten. Other state governments have applied the same formula to restrict okada to certain parts of the state capitals. Thanks to Nasir el-Rufai, the ban is effective in Abuja metropolis. But banning does nothing to make okada a safe ride. Banning is actually hostile to the okada business environment. The solution lies in the points I made above. Let us have okada but let us have safe okada rides. No okada passenger wants to be an Igbobi land lord.