A video is circulating on social media of a woman brushing her teeth by the roadside, rinsing with water from a small sachet, somewhere along the Benin-Agbor road. She has been there for two days. Around her, hundreds of vehicles are queuing bumper to bumper.
Engines are off. Drivers doze in their seats or stand outside stretching their legs on a stretch of highway that has effectively become an open-air waiting room. Far away on the Abuja-Kaduna expressway, a separate gridlock has left travellers stuck for up to three days, some reportedly approached by youths demanding informal fees to help clear a path through the chaos. This is no longer an unlucky one-off. It has become a pattern. It deserves to be examined as the public health story that it is, not only a transport or economic one.
Now, it helps to look beyond Nigeria for a moment. The country is not inventing a new problem; it is living through a particularly severe version of an old one. The World Health Organization estimates that close to 1.2 million people die on the world's roads every year. Road injuries remain the leading cause of death for people between five and twenty-nine years old. Ninety-two per cent of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, even though those countries own only around sixty per cent of the world's vehicles. What is happening on Nigerian highways right now closely fits that global pattern. A two-hour drive from Benin to Asaba has stretched into a four-day ordeal for some travellers. These are roads that do the most damage to people with the fewest options.
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The Federal Road Safety Corps recorded 9,570 crashes and 5,421 deaths across 2024. In the first quarter of 2025, crashes fell slightly compared with the same period the year before, yet deaths rose by more than eight per cent. Fewer crashes but more deaths suggest the collisions that do happen are becoming more severe. However, the current gridlock crisis on routes like Benin-Agbor-Asaba and Abuja-Kaduna introduces a different, quieter kind of harm. It rarely shows up in official statistics. Nobody dies instantly in a traffic jam. Yet being stuck for two, three, or four days on a highway, with no proper sanitation, no reliable food supply, and no shade carries its own set of dangers.
The truth is that dehydration sets in quickly in the kind of heat those corridors sometimes witness. Children and elderly passengers are especially at risk, partly because they cannot always say clearly how unwell they feel. Anyone managing a chronic condition, such as diabetes or high blood pressure, faces a real risk too. Medication is usually packed for the length of an ordinary journey, not for an unplanned four-day detention on the road. Pregnant women travelling those routes face a genuine emergency if labour begins with no clinic in sight and no ambulance able to move through a queue of stalled vehicles. Some travellers caught in these jams have abandoned their cars altogether and trekked through bush paths to escape the congestion. Prolonged exposure on a stalled highway is exchanged for the risk of walking unfamiliar, sometimes insecure terrain on foot, often with luggage and children in tow.
All of this comes with a mental strain, which deserves mentioning. Sitting in a vehicle for days, uncertain when the road will clear, watching food and money run low while strangers around you grow increasingly tense, is genuinely distressing. That distress does not always end when the vehicle finally moves again. It can show up later as short tempers, poor sleep, and a kind of exhaustion that makes a driver more likely to misjudge a bend once the road opens and everyone speeds up to claw back the hours they lost. Economic analysts have put the losses from a recent five-day shutdown on South-South roads at around five hundred billion naira. That figure says nothing about the perishable goods spoiling in stranded trucks or the medical supplies that never reached their destination.
Reports from Agbor describe it turning into a makeshift night market during the gridlock, with hungry passengers buying whatever food is available, often at inflated prices and with little regard for how it has been stored or prepared. That matters more than it might seem. A simple stomach upset picked up from a roadside vendor can turn a bad journey into a medical crisis when the nearest functioning clinic is hours away in either direction.
None of this is suggesting that individual travellers are responsible for roads, which successive governments have failed to maintain. The Federal Government reportedly paid over one billion naira for repairs to the Benin-Agbor road between 2021 and 2026, and the road failed anyway. The government has also committed hundreds of billions of naira to the Abuja-Kaduna-Kano corridor, yet motorists were still stranded for days in August. The frustration Nigerians feel watching roads repeatedly funded and repeatedly failing is entirely justified. Personal preparation cannot fix a road. That work has to happen at a policy level, and Nigerians are right to keep demanding it publicly. However, while it happens, there are choices within a traveller's own control that genuinely reduce harm when a journey goes wrong.
Carrying more water and food than a normal journey would seem to require is no longer excessive caution. It is simply practical on these known problem corridors. Anyone on regular medication should travel with several days' worth, not the exact dose needed for the expected trip's duration. Families should agree beforehand on how they will stay in touch if a journey runs long, rather than relying on a single phone call that may never come through in an area with patchy network coverage. Checking road reports and social media updates before setting out can mean choosing a longer but clearer route instead of driving straight into a known gridlock. And once free of a jam, resisting the urge to speed matters just as much as any decision made before departure. Fatigue and frustration are exactly the conditions in which crashes happen.
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The people trapped for days on the Benin-Asaba road, the Abuja-Kaduna highway and others like them did nothing wrong beyond needing to travel in their own country. Their ordeal is, first and foremost, a failure of planning and maintenance, and that responsibility belongs to those who build and look after these roads. However, until that changes, the small decisions travellers make before they leave home can determine whether a difficult journey remains difficult or turns into a genuine health emergency.
Ojenagbon, a health communication expert and certified management trainer, lives in Lagos.
