FACTSHEET: Road safety in Nigeria in wake of high-profile crash
On 29 December 2025, former two-time unified heavyweight boxing champion Anthony Joshua was in a fatal road crash on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway.
Two of Joshua's close associates and team members, Sina Ghami and Latif Ayodele, died when their vehicle collided with a stationary truck by the roadside. Joshua sustained minor injuries and was briefly hospitalised.
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Authorities, including the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) and state police, attributed the crash to a tyre burst, speeding and wrongful overtaking. The driver was arrested and charged with various offences, including manslaughter.
The high-profile nature of the incident revived scrutiny of Nigeria's long-standing road safety challenges, with the media, civil society groups and lawmakers highlighting system failure and urging reforms.
This factsheet examines key trends in road safety in the country.
The FRSC, which oversees road safety in Nigeria, publishes quarterly road safety data in partnership with the National Bureau of Statistics. The most recent report, for the second quarter of 2024, recorded 1,305 road traffic deaths nationwide.
At a press briefing in January 2025, the FRSC corps marshal, Shehu Mohammed, said Nigeria recorded 5,421 road traffic deaths in 2024, from 9,570 reported crashes. This represented a 7% increase in deaths (5,081 in 2023), despite a 10% drop in total crashes (10,617).
Two months earlier, Mohammed said that the FRSC had recorded 7,715 crashes between January and September 2025. These crashes resulted in 3,915 deaths and 24,674 injuries.
Overall, the data shows a gradual decline in annual crashes and fatalities since 2021, when 6,205 deaths were reported. Recorded road crashes fell from over 13,000 in 2021 and 2022 to fewer than 10,000 in 2024, while deaths declined to fewer than 5,500 in 2024.
The data shows that roads are most dangerous at the beginning and end of the year. Crashes usually peak in the last quarter, while fatalities are highest in the first quarter, largely due to increased travel during Christmas and New Year celebrations.
To address this, the FRSC runs nationwide campaigns every December. For example, the agency launched "Operation Zero Exercise" between 15 December 2025 and 15 January 2026, deploying officers for round-the-clock patrols, traffic management and emergency response.
FRSC public education officer, assistant corps marshal Olusegun Ogungbemide, said that the campaigns had helped reduce festive-season crashes.
He told Africa Check: "The question to ask is: how bad would it be if the FRSC did not embark on these campaigns? Of course, it would have been a lot worse if some drivers and passengers had not heard our messages on how to drive safely.
"We use every medium possible to educate the public on the need to drive safely and obey traffic laws. We have used newspapers, TV, radio, social media and our mobile app, and have changed strategy from targeting drivers to targeting passengers. This was informed by data analysis."
Speeding has consistently been the leading cause of road crashes every quarter since 2021. In the second quarter of 2024, nearly half (47.4%) of all recorded crashes were attributed to speed violations.
Other major causes included mechanically defective vehicles, tyre bursts, driver fatigue and overloading.
Ogungbemide said distracted driving was also a growing concern, such as being on phones or eating while at the wheel. But speeding was the major factor in deaths, he said.
"When accidents occur on bad roads, where drivers are unable to speed, they are usually not fatal. Our main focus now is speed reduction. That's why we have introduced speed limiters in commercial vehicles," he told Africa Check.
The quarterly reports note that road incident data is provided by the FRSC and verified and validated by the National Bureau of Statistics.
Ogungbemide told Africa Check that the figures are not estimates. "These are data with names collected, date, location, type of vehicles, gender and every other information on each accident.
"Our men are all over the country, so most of the time the data is collected on the spot or through our call centre because people call us to report road crashes. We have a template for recording them. We also get information about road crashes from the police and other law enforcement agencies," he said.
The FRSC official acknowledged that some minor crashes go unreported.
"For instance, in Lagos, probably thousands of minor accidents go unreported amid traffic congestion. Sometimes we charge drivers with failure to report a road crash. Many are unaware that it is an offence to fail to report a road crash you were involved in," Ogungbemide said.
In the second quarter of 2024, Nigeria's north-central zone, which includes the capital, Abuja, recorded the highest number of crashes at 867, leading to 403 fatalities.
It was followed by the south-west zone, which includes bustling Lagos, with 661 crashes and 316 deaths. The south-east had the lowest number of crashes (119) while the south-south had the lowest fatalities, 73 from 142 road crashes.
The Lagos-Ibadan expressway, where the Joshua crash occurred, is one of the busiest highways in the south-west, linking two of the country's largest cities. Recent records show it has also become one of the deadliest.
Media reports indicate 73 deaths from 175 crashes along the 128-kilometre expressway in the first quarter of 2025, and 645 deaths over 27 months.
Men account for the vast majority of road crash victims in Nigeria.
From quarter to quarter, adult males account for over 70% of deaths in crashes. Of the 1,305 killed in road crashes in the second quarter of 2024, nearly 80%, or 1,036, were adult males.
Over the same period 186 adult females were killed (14.3%), while 40 were male children (3.1%) and 43 female children (3.3%).
Commercial vehicles were also disproportionately involved, accounting for over two thirds (67.7%) of crashes, compared with 31.1% involving private vehicles. Authorities say these vehicles are yet to fully comply with a rule requiring they install speed limiting devices.
The World Health Organization's most recent estimates show that Nigeria's road traffic death rate was 17.2 people per 100,000 population in 2021 - higher than the global average of 15, but lower than the average in Africa of 19.
The WHO's estimated 36,722 road deaths for Nigeria in 2021 placed the country fourth globally in total number of deaths, behind China, India and the United States.
According to WHO's global status report on road safety 2023, for 2021, there were huge differences between the number of fatalities reported by each of the 120 countries observed and the WHO estimates.
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"In some cases, the estimated figures are 10 times higher, and in one case, 49 times higher. While the causes of these differences vary, major contributing factors are the data sources and definitions used," the report says.
"WHO estimates are based on civil registration and vital statistics that consolidate data from multiple sources and include all deaths resulting from road traffic crashes in a given year, regardless of the length of time between the crash date and the death.
"Many countries report data from only one source and only include deaths that occur at the scene, or within a limited time period from the date of the crash," the report added.
Nigeria's road safety response remains inadequate, Paul Ugboaja, a professor of transport management technology at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, told Africa Check.
He urged the FRSC to devise better ways of checking the physical and mental health of drivers and the state of commercial vehicles before they drove on the highways.
"The government also needs to build secure rest areas along our highways so that drivers on long-distance journeys can park and rest after driving for two or three hours. Taking such rests should be mandatory, and FRSC should enforce and track it with a device such as a tachograph."
A tachograph is a device used in vehicles to record how a driver operates the vehicle over time.
"This will reduce the risk of a driver falling asleep while driving or losing concentration due to fatigue," Ugboaja said.
