Daily Independent (Lagos)
Kola Ibrahim
2 January 2009
opinion
By the time this article is published, the ill-fated policy of the Federal Government and Federal Road Safety Corp (FRSC) should have started taking its tolls on the poor people of Nigeria. The latest policy of the FRSC on the compulsory use of motorcycle helmet by riders and passengers alike come January 1, 2009 is nothing but a reflection of the high level of intellectual disconnect in governance in Nigeria.
To the FRSC, the policy is meant to safeguard lives. This argument in the first is totally outlandish because no fact has been adduced by FRSC that major motorbike accidents leading to deaths are caused mainly by head injury. Limiting accidents to head injury alone shows crisis of governance in Nigerian.
While the motorbike may not be for commercial purpose alone, the reality however is that majority of motorbike riders are commercial, many of whom are poor peasants (who could not survive in the farms as a result of lack of accessible roads, storage facilities, looted fertilizers, etc); artisans (who have been driven to unemployment as a result lack of patronage, power failure, registration fees, poverty, etc); unemployed graduates; retrenched workers; etc, many of whom even getting the motorbike on lease or at second hand rate. A careful study will reveal that a significant proportion of those in motorcycle transport business are youths (aged between 15 to 35 years), who are either supposed to be in school or contributing to national growth but pushed to this life-risking job; and older who were as old as 60 years old, mostly using their old motorbikes to survive the economic downturn. Yet these folks (both young and old) feed their families with this.
Under this scenario, the policy is nothing but another attack on the poor people.
The FRSC has not informed us whether they have done a full investigation into how many of the motorbike riders (either for commercial or private use) have helmets, and if they do not have, is the government providing them with new ones free of charge? Or do the FRSC expects the motorbike riders to go to the black market to get helmets, the same way Nigerians get fuel, water, electricity, fertilizers, etc? Do the FRSC, Customs and the government know that several motorbikes are imported daily into the country without safety facilities? Where do the FRSC expect motorbike riders to get extra helmets for their passengers when government did not establish a helmet manufacturing company but rather looked the other way when motorbike without safety facilities were imported to the country.
Has the government and FRSC looked at the health implication of several persons using the same helmet or is the government planning to give every citizen a helmet each and when? From the sordid nature in which this policy was pushed forward, it is clear that the immediate answers to these questions are in the negative. It is worth stating that commercial motorbike business is only a product of the decaying state of the nation's transport system. The Okada business arose as a result of the rotten state of the nation's roads which has made many vehicles avoid intra-city/town and street roads; and the failure of organized public transport system. The same way the railway system was destroyed only for the heavy-duty vehicles with their huge weights take over the roads leading to over crowding of the roads, destruction of fragile road layout and causing unmitigated accidents.
The grinding poverty and joblessness only fueled this rottenness into the current booming motorbike business while importers continue to lick the cream. It is this kind of misnomer that the Nigerian government and the FRSC want to "normalize" with this kind of helmet policy.
Very unfortunately, FRSC like every other sycophantic government agency, is not ready to expose the failure of its paymasters and demand infrastructural development vis-a-vis massive road rehabilitation and construction, and organized public transport system as a condition for accident-free society. It is not uncommon to hear FRSC officials condemning people selling goods along roadsides but keep mum on government that collects taxes and levies from these people without building appropriate market facilities. As terrible and corrupt as the military regimes were, they set up cheap and time-bound public transport schemes that worked for some time before their graft tendencies killed it. The civilian regimes that took over only sold the better parts of the public transport remnants to themselves. Rather than embark on massive road projects and provide organized and cheap public transport which would have directly employed thousands of young graduates, artisans, etc, the civilian politicians prefer to buy motorbikes for a handful of youth and few buses (with inscription of governor's or council chairman's name) for commercial drivers' associations, as patronage for votes.
The new helmet policy of the FRSC and the Yar'Adua government has nothing to do with the basic cause of road accidents. In actual fact, it is an unscientific attempt to reduce the impact of accident injuries and not mitigate them. Like the earlier Senate three-on-a-bus-seat policy, the current policy will resolve nothing but result to mere failure and more hardship for those already struggling for survival.
The current policy is ill-advised, ill-prepared and ill-conceived; it only wants to place the burden of government's irresponsibility and failure on people. Several investigations have revealed that it is breakdown of infrastructural facilities and the dwindling national economy (which created a desperate citizenry) that are behind the road accidents. A government that places the transport of the citizens in the anarchical arrangement of individualistic transport system where poor and economically frustrated people, who are using every avenue to survive in-between penury and misery, is nothing but useless. While governments at all levels care less about public transport, the same government imposes obnoxious fuel prices and taxes in defence of the big business and looting classes, making poor people fall deeper into bottomless pit of penury and wretchedness. Some state governments which claim to be running public transport are only practicing advanced level of anarchical individualistic transport system, and only serve as another tag for public robbery. For instance, a state government who claims to be running public transport, will hand over such business to big transport companies (mostly owned by politicians in power or their acolytes) and big banks (who borrow out the money for the business at exorbitant interest rates), and create artificial market for this business by clearing away the poor commercial operators from roads. The end result will be overpriced but insufficient transport arrangement.
The immediate result of the current helmet policy, if it ever sees the light of the day, will be denial of the poor commercial operators and their dependants, means of livelihood as most of them will find it hard to get other jobs. This will further engender more crimes - both petty and big-time - while poverty will dwell the land the more and in the absence of alternative structures mobilizing people for a change, social tensions through religious, ethnic and communal strife will take charge.
Ibrahim is of Obafemi
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