Lagos — For mainly man-made reasons, road accidents have become constant news items in Nigeria. Considering the fact that most of them are avoidable, it would be unfortunate indeed for the country to continue to harvest more casualties and other losses.

The pathos that goes with these sad occurrences confirms the urgency of the situation. Two weeks ago, an accident involving a bus conveying some students of the Government Science Secondary School, Lokoja from a tourist location in the town claimed the lives of 12 of them and left many others severely injured. Reported to have overloaded his vehicle, the driver was said to have lost the control of the ill-fated vehicle and jumped out, leaving the innocent passengers to their doom.

That tragedy followed another one that killed 20 students along Benin - Asaba Expressway. And not long ago, the nation was forced to mourn the soldiers who lost their lives on the road while returning from the peacekeeping mission in Darfur, Sudan. The former ADC to former President Olusegun Obasanjo, Brigadier Giwa-Amu had earlier died under similar circumstances. The chronicle of these ghastly incidents is long, disturbing and injurious to the image of an endowed nation like Nigeria. And until the issues are well-articulated and appropriate solutions found, this cycle of agony will remain.

But that need not be the lot of the nation. That our roads have largely remained death-traps, despite the hundreds of billions of naira committed to them by successive governments at all levels, is a well-known fact. That the government appears to be overwhelmed by the task of providing safe means of movement of goods and people makes it all the more worrisome.

Not many people expect the roads to be in excellent shape as long as heavy-duty trucks, whose haulage activities are inevitable because of the comatose railway system, compete with smaller vehicles for space on roads. The challenge here, no doubt, is enormous. But with the needed political will, the government can lead the country along the path of motorable roads.

As critical as fixing that problem is, good roads are only a part of the overall predicament of land transportation in the country. Proper monitoring of operations is clearly deficient at the moment. Some of these disasters have been linked to dangerous or mediocre driving while others are caused by vehicles in bad conditions and even those that are parked by the roadside, often with poor or non-existent warning signs.

We know that there are enough traffic laws that could safeguard road use. But they can only be meaningful to the citizenry if they are strictly enforced. The Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) and Vehicle Inspectorate Officers (VIOs) must now prove their efficiency in that regard and halt a further slide into the destruction of lives and property. There was a time in this country when the FRSC was synonymous with uprightness, competence and dedication to the cause of eliminating road accidents. Sadly, however, that picture seems to have given way to something less edifying. Luckily, it is never too late to initiate a new beginning. The Commission and related agencies should now do so by intensifying enlightenment campaign and ensuring compliance with road codes, especially by drivers.

For the calamities that have already occurred, thorough investigations should be conducted to ascertain their actual causes in order to prevent future ones and penalize culprits, when convicted. The country has suffered enough loss of lives on the roads.