To get on the road, any road at all, in Nigeria is to risk death, simply put. It is to risk breathing one’s last with or without fiery flames, or jagged metals mutilating the body.
To get on the road, any road at all in Nigeria is to risk attacks by those who set up their camps of death on Nigeria’s roads in a bid to promote their business of killing, maiming and abduction.
In the face of the irrefutable conclusion that many of Nigeria’s roads have become unsafe, would it be unsafe to say that Nigeria’s unsafe roads provide a metaphor for the directionless journey the country has embarked upon since 1999, but especially since 2015?
Every day, in many parts of Nigeria, sirens wail, bearing in them the bodies of those slain on Nigeria’s roads, and bearing in their plaintive notes lamentations for the lives needlessly wasted on Nigeria’s roads often.
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People leave their loved ones at home, take to Nigerian roads to run simple errands and are instead taken to the mortuary, their bodies mangled beyond recognition to leave their families heartbroken.
The many road accidents which occur in Nigeria almost daily claiming lives and limbs in their number tell of just how much the country has failed to fix something as basic as its roads for many years now.
If Nigeria is where it is today as a country, it is because there are many unnecessary and completely avoidable niggles that continue to hold it back. If the country is to leave its current spot it has to ensure that those niggles which seem insignificant but are anything but are checked.
Kene Obiezu writes via [email protected]
