Date Published: 10/05/09

Roads to disaster By Emmanuel Onwubiko

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The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) under the leadership of Air Vice Marshal Muhammad Audu – Bida (rtd) has gained public confidence because of the numerous sustainable programmes which it has carried out including but not limited to relief distribution; rehabilitation of disaster victims; evacuation/rehabilitations from Abroad; and awareness campaigns on periodic disasters.

For now, the decision of the Director General of National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) Muhammad Audu-Bida, a retired Air Force General, to take disaster management to the grassroots has received the commendation of several independent development focused non-governmental organizations including the Human Rights Writers’ Association of Nigeria which has invited the Agency to deliver a keynote speech at its charity fund raising scheduled for November 11 th 2009 in the nation’s capital.

AVM. Audu-Bida told a select group of media executives including this writer that his agency is focusing on taking disaster management to the grassroots because;

“The communities are the first responders and are the basic units affected by disasters. Whatever the level of the disaster (whether minor, major, or national) it is the communities that suffer most and respond first before any intervention from outside-government agencies, non-governmental organization. Experience has shown that the communities least affected by the worst disasters and recovered fastest are the communities that are better aware and can rely on mutual support system and their resources.”

“It is in the light of the above that the National Emergency Management Agency adopted the grassroots emergency volunteer programme. Under this programme, 200 volunteers are being trained for each participating local government to provide a pool of trained emergency managers in the communities, who will act as first responders in the event of disaster. The training programme introduces the volunteers to disaster management concepts, community responsibilities, support systems and resources required for primary disaster management, stakeholders networking and coordination, prevention and mitigation options and some basic first aids procedures.”

He spoke further;

“In the spirit of collaboration, the programme engages competent hands from the other stakeholders such as Nigeria Police, Nigerian Army, Nigerian Security and Civil Defence corps, Federal Road Safety Commission, National Air Space Management Authority, Nigerian Red Cross, the States Ministries of Health and Environment, NEMA and SEMA Executives to train the volunteers.”

“The Agency has so far trained 4,694 volunteers in 21 local governments of the six geopolitical zones, between 2 nd June 2008 and December, 2008.”

I learnt from very competent sources that NEMA has equally done a study on the major causes of road accidents across the country in collaboration with the Federal Roads Safety Commission (FRSC) in close partnership with members of some State Emergency Management Agencies in some flash points and made recommendations to some state governments on the urgent need to decongest some major Federal Highways which passed through these states and are now used by heavy duty vehicles drivers as transit camps thereby constituting veritable sources of road disaster.

Tafa Junction, Forest/Mararaba- Jos, all in Kaduna state are some of these flash points that need urgent action to stop further preventable deaths from accidents.

It is a well known fact that Nigerian roads are death traps and are indeed the greatest contributor to the cases of disaster in Nigeria so much so that several hundreds of our citizens have perished on these pot-holes ridden federal roads all across Nigeria and especially in the South-East, Lagos-Benin Express, Lokoja-Abuja Highway and the Maiduguri highways. But for mother luck and the intervention of our Blessed Virgin Mary and the Almighty God, a living legend like Chinua Achebe of the ‘Things fall Apart’ fame would have died from road accident which left him permanently confined to the wheel chair because he sustained severe spinal chord injuries in a motor accident in Nigeria. Professor Chinua Achebe had to be rushed to the United States of America where he got a world class medical attention because if he was taken to any of our heavily neglected public health institutions, only God knows what would have become of him.

Several vastly gifted Nigerians were not so lucky like Chinua Achebe because they perished in one car mishap or the other caused basically by the bad condition of the Nigerian highways among other human factors. Chinua Ubani, a well known Human Rights Activist who fought vigorously alongside other patriotic Nigerians to actualize our current civilian rule, died in a car crash along the Maiduguri’s dilapidated federal road infrastructure.

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The story of the notorious state of some South African roads as captured in the book “ South Africa’s brave new world; the beloved country since the end of Apartheid” as written by R.W. Johnson is a true of reflection of Nigeria’s roads’ situation especially the so-called Federal Roads.

Johnson observed that;

“In 1988 some 75 percent of South Africa’s national and provincial roads were graded as being in good or very good condition. In 1999 the Automobile Association pointed out that this figure had dropped to 33 percent while the roads in poor or very poor condition had leapt from 5 percent to 33 percent. Nothing was done despite strong warnings that neglect of maintenance would result in far bigger bills down the line. In 2001 the SA Bitumen Association warned that ‘a point of no return’ could be reached when repairs became prohibitively expensive; just to prevent further deterioration road spending needed to be doubled and the government should realize that ‘the state could find itself as a potentially unsuccessful defendant’ in over 100,000 accident cases a year if the situation was left unattended. Despite this, chronic under funding continued.”

Johnson called South African Highways as ‘roads to disaster’. Nigeria roads are indeed roads to disaster. Unlike South Africa where Mr. Johnson in his scholarly book had traced under funding as the sole factor responsible for the decay in roads’ infrastructure, in Nigeria’s case several billions of tax payers’ funds were budgeted and released since 1999 but as can be seen by even the most senile blind observer, Nigerian roads are in such a terrible state of disrepair that they can be rated as some of the worst roads in the entire world with the possible exception of the roads in Haiti, the World’s poorest nation.

Shockingly, no Government official of the ministry of Works is undergoing prosecution for the criminal diversion, looting and fraudulent conversion to private use of the massive amount of money said to have been released.

Nigerian government and all Stakeholders must wake up from slumber to repair our roads and save millions of commuters from untimely deaths.