Naijawire - The IRIN online news recently posted an article about driving in Nigeria, insinuating that “one of the most dangerous things anyone can do in Nigeria is to get into a car”. Bad publicity as most of us may see this, there are several elements of truths in the article.

I recollect while still living in Nigeria, Ibadan to be specific, that most of the roads are terrible and hardly maintained. No one seems to care about road maintainance, and when the people in authority needs to grab some money into their pockets, multi-million naira bogus contracts are awarded but never executed.

It is not uncommon to see residents taking charge of their destiny to keep the roads in near-usable conditions. One at times, wonder why those mass transit trucks (aka Molue) have a long life span in Nigeria. With terrible roads, accidents are always waiting to happen. Armed Robbers take advantage of the situation to dispose people of hard earned valuables including their vehicles. The security operatives do not help matters as well. Rather than maintain law and order, they are mostly interested in mounting illegal road blocks to collect “title” (bribe) from innocent motorists. The freeways (express roads) are not spared of the same fate as rural/urban road ways.  One cannot but remember the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, when it used to have three toll collection posts. What on earth were the revenues collected used for? Thank goodness, those posts were removed.

Agreed, most vehicles on Nigeria roads are not totally road worthy and have resulted into the untimely deaths of thousands of people. But who is to blame? Is it the average Nigerian motorist that is struggling to make ends meet and need to get from point A to B in order to earn a living, or is it the corrupt security operatives, who shamelessly receive bribes from motorists driving those vehicles that are suppose to be in the junk yards, or maybe the authorities who are more concerned with enriching their pockets than making life easier for the citizens or just maybe it’s the western world that are happy to allow all the junks from their own countries, find a solace in developing countries like ours?

God save Nigeria…

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