It happened in Lokoja a few days ago. Yes, another oil truck exploded and killed many people. As I write, Lagos is in pain as an oil truck has done the usual: exploded on our roads. “On arrival at the scene, it was observed that there was a gas explosion at the aforementioned address. Further investigation revealed that an unknown truck conveying gasoline had a lone accident and exploded. The impact of the explosion led to fire at adjoining buildings and several vehicles were burnt,” LASEMA said in a statement.
This evil will not stop until Nigeria leads. My proposal has remained simple: courts should allow victims to directly sue the corporate owners of the trucks and judges should make space for a total transfer of ownership of the companies to compensate the victims. In other words, if the company does not have much to compensate, the court could simply award the whole company to the victims.
If you do that, companies will start paying attention to this mayhem. At the moment, there is no real penalty and that is the reason we keep having falling trucks in densely populated communities, killing many across Nigeria. Largely, the only way to fix this paralysis is to go after the wallets of the owners of these trucks. Once we do that as a nation, this oil truck explosion on our roads will disappear.
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Mr. President, your sympathy press statement is not what we want. You need to take ownership, and fix this urgently.
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If oil truck is not falling or exploding somewhere, then a container is falling off a moving truck somewhere; and if you are not conversant with the environment, you might think it’s a one off or accident. Well, another one will soon fall, or explode, then it will be reported, and the president or governor will issue a press release. It goes on and on, it never ends. That’s the story of Nigeria.
It’s not as if we are not expecting these tragedies to happen, if you pass through some of the bad roads and see these trucks, the only thing your head will be telling you is danger, danger; we know these things.
Our response? Nothing! Boko Haram is still killing our soldiers in the north, with occasional mayhem on civilians, kidnapping at will; but we seem to have accepted that as our reality, so it largely attracts a yawn in many quarters.
What is the worth of life in Nigeria? It’s a good place to start from.
Buildings will still collapse, pipelines will still explode, containers will still fall, and oil trucks will still catch fire. They won’t stop by wishful thinking, if we don’t act, we will be here again.
RIP to the dead.
The accidents occur because the vehicles conveying either the petrol tankers or containers are not road worthy.
There are no newly manufactured trucks in Nigeria; all we have are trucks and trailers discarded in Europe or other foreign countries which are imported in Nigeria as “second new”.
If we can stop the use of old and non roadworthy vehicles in our country, we would be close to stopping the weekly carnage caused by tankers and trailers.