Nigeria’s long-standing road safety failures have come under renewed scrutiny as Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan of Kogi Central called for urgent, far-reaching reforms to the nation’s highway safety architecture, warning that preventable crashes continue to claim lives daily.
The Senator’s intervention follows a fatal road accident that claimed the lives of two close associates of global boxing star Anthony Joshua during their visit to Nigeria—an incident she described as tragic, but far from isolated.
According to Akpoti-Uduaghan, the country’s highways have become lethal not by chance, but by design flaws marked by weak enforcement, exhausted drivers and the near-total absence of real-time emergency response.
“Nigeria’s road deaths are not acts of fate,” she said in a statement released Tuesday. “They are the predictable outcome of systems that fail people at every critical moment.”
While extending condolences to Joshua and the bereaved families, the Senator stressed that the tragedy mirrors what thousands of Nigerian families endure yearly—often without public attention or accountability.
She challenged the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) to adopt stricter, intelligence-driven enforcement mechanisms, noting that existing regulations have little impact without visible, consistent consequences for violations.
“When safety rules exist only on paper, danger becomes routine,” Akpoti-Uduaghan warned, arguing that lax monitoring has emboldened reckless driving across major transport corridors.
The Senator also identified driver fatigue as a silent but deadly factor, urging the Federal Government to embed properly equipped rest-in stations and lay-bys into highway development and concession agreements.
“A tired driver is not reckless by choice,” she said. “Fatigue reflects a failure of infrastructure, not discipline. Roads must be built with human limits in mind.”
More critically, Akpoti-Uduaghan highlighted the absence of coordinated emergency rescue services on Nigerian highways, noting that many crash victims die not from injuries sustained, but from delayed medical intervention.
She called for the establishment of a dedicated Highway Emergency Rescue Service, complete with ambulances, trauma-care units and trained responders positioned along major routes.
“Survival should never depend on luck, distance or who happens to pass by,” she said. “Emergency response must be engineered to arrive within minutes, not hours.”
Describing road safety as a national emergency rather than a bureaucratic concern, the Senator warned that without decisive action, tragedies like the one involving Joshua’s friends would continue to recur.
“This incident must not disappear with the headlines,” she added. “It should force a reckoning with how cheaply human life is treated on our roads.”
Akpoti-Uduaghan reaffirmed her commitment to pursuing legislative and policy measures aimed at safer highways, while again extending her sympathy to Anthony Joshua and the families affected by the accident.
Akpoti-Uduaghan urges road safety reforms after Joshua-linked highway tragedy
