IT was her first pregnancy after many years of marriage and they were over the moon. The years of difficult waiting were over, the settling gloom lifted by a growing bulge. She knew nothing about babies and embarked on a journey to see her sister who was a veteran of motherhood.HER husband took her to the bus station and returned home but she did not get to her destination. It was her corpse that was brought home to be buried. The baby she was expecting'she was seven months pregnant'was entombed in her womb and never saw the light of life, never woke to a morning bright. THE woman's husband told the story of how his world almost came to and end the day his wife and his expected baby were killed in a road accident. It was not revealed what caused the accident.THE accident in which one girl was killed was caused by the police, according to many witnesses. She was travelling from Lagos to Ilorin, but her journey ended on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. A police roadblock at a dangerous spot led to a build-up of traffic and then a fiery pile-up. Her dream of a university education'she was invited by a university to write an examination after her success in the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination'was consumed with her body.HER body, like the bodies of many of the victims, was unrecognisable. Her elder brother had a sorrowful remembrance of her: he had taken her picture with his phone camera before she went to the bus station. The smiling girl of less than an hour before was now a skeleton twisted into a grotesque shape of pain.NIGERIANS die almost every day on the country's terrible roads and there is mourning in many homes. Seventeen people were killed in a road accident in Bauchi State on November 9. There is regular slaughter on Kogi State roads. An official of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) said 35 people were killed in road accidents in Kogi State in October and that 211 people were injured. There were 58 accidents in only one month and it may have been more. Many accidents are not reported in Nigeria.THE Corps Marshal and Chief Executive of FRSC, Mr Osita Chidoka, said at the Nigerian Institute of Safety Professionals' Conference in Warri in October that Nigeria was number 191 out of 192 countries in the World Road ranking. This is shocking proof of the primitive state of Nigerian roads. Even roads in the harsh Australian outback are better than Nigerian roads.CORRUPTION, more than incompetence, is responsible for the poor quality of Nigerian roads. Contractors are compelled to pay crippling kickbacks by government officials and they use inferior materials. The roads are certified as being of excellent quality but they do not survive a rainy season. A stretch of one express road looks like amateurishly done plastic surgery; the fast lane is higher than the slow lane and the sharpness of the long, raised edge can puncture tyres, making the car to somersault. Yet a government engineer closed his eyes to this blindingly obvious danger.MOST of the country's roads are not maintained. A pothole is allowed to become a crater and an accident does not wait before happening; the crater is decorated with corpses. In one small African country, workers repair roads in the night under floodlights. The highways are smooth and city roads are free of potholes. It is a small country without many resources, but the government knows good roads are a mark of high civilisation.IT was a point Joyce Cary tried to make as colonial officer in the Borgu area of Nigeria two years after the amalgamation. Cary built roads, as Harry Rudbeck, a character in Mister Johnson, his novel 'about' Nigeria, does. Some of the roads constructed five years ago, say, are not as solid as the roads Cary built before he returned to England in 1920.THE human factor is a great contributor to road accidents in Nigeria. Many drivers on the road are illiterate and cannot read road signs. They have never heard of the Highway Code. Some of them are not good drivers and were issued licences without being tested. There is a racket in driver's licences. A blind man can obtain one in Nigeria. It is all about cash and has absolutely nothing to do with driving skills. Some of the motorists drive at excessive speed.MANY of the vehicles on the road are in a poor mechanical state. There is a booming trade in fake spare parts and the use of imported old tyres, which often burst, make body parts a common sight on the highways.FEDERAL Road Safety officers are good at removing battered bodies from mangled vehicles. They take bribes and there is now a surfeit of dead bodies to convey to the mortuary. One senior marshal slapped a man who told him to stop extorting money from commercial vehicle drivers. The marshal's disgraceful behaviour was published in a newspaper but he was not punished by his superiors. It seems it is now normal for marshals to demand bribes.FRSC officials see foolish motorists talking on their mobile phone but do nothing. They do not try to apprehend motorists who break the law at roundabouts. They do not speak sharply to companies that place heavy drums close to city roads to discourage parking in front of their premises. The officers are more interested in harassing commercial bus drivers.THE FRSC needs a rebirth or unborn babies will continue to be killed on the country's highway.
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