Anthony Joshua and the anatomy of Nigeria’s road safety failure

The tragic irony of public policy failure is that it often requires a high-profile incident before society pauses to reflect on what has long been obvious. For decades, Nigeria’s roads have remained theatres of avoidable deaths, silent witnesses to regulatory indifference, institutional weakness, and a collective tolerance for danger. Yet it took the involvement of Anthony Joshua, a globally celebrated sports icon, for the question of road safety to once again force itself into national and international consciousness. This is not because the incident was unique in scale or severity, but because celebrities have a way of illuminating what everyday suffering has normalised.

The crash involving Anthony Joshua did not introduce a new problem. Rather, it merely exposed, yet again, the deep structural failures embedded in Nigeria’s transport safety ecosystem. Every day, across highways and inner roads, Nigerians perish in similar or worse circumstances, without cameras, without headlines, and without outrage. Their lives disappear into statistics, if they are counted at all.

The uncomfortable truth is that the attention generated by this incident says more about our skewed valuation of human life than about the uniqueness of the accident itself. On the very day this incident dominated the news cycle, reports emerged of seven journalists losing their lives in a road accident in Gombe State.

That tragedy barely registered nationally. Such selective empathy is itself a moral indictment. The truth is equally that, for virtually every single day, a minimum of fifty lives are lost to avoidable accidents, while many are maimed, with some carrying avoidable disabilities for life. At the heart of Nigeria’s road safety crisis lies a dangerous combination of regulatory failure, infrastructural decay, institutional overstretch, corruption, and cultural indiscipline. Our roads are unsafe not merely because accidents occur, but because the system appears designed to guarantee that when accidents happen, the consequences are as fatal as possible. From poor road design to lax enforcement, from unroadworthy vehicles to untrained drivers, from stationary trailers to non-existent emergency response, every link in the safety chain is either weak or completely broken.

One of the most troubling aspects of the Anthony Joshua incident was not even the crash itself, but the speed with which conclusions were drawn by officials of the Federal Road Safety Commission. Even before any transparent or professional investigation, allegations of dangerous overtaking and recklessness were casually offered to the public. While no one says this could not be the cause of the accident, the perfunctory manner in which the cause was constructed and dished to the public space says more about our lack of due regard for proper investigation.

This reflexive blame culture is symptomatic of a system more interested in deflecting responsibility than uncovering truth. Road accident investigation is a technical discipline requiring forensic analysis, scene reconstruction, vehicle examination, and human-factor assessment.

In Nigeria, however, conclusions often precede investigations, reinforcing public distrust and underscoring institutional incompetence. Enquiries such as when the vehicle broke down, or was parked at that spot? Was it parked on the shoulder of the road or the road setback? Was it lying on the part of the motorable way? Any indicators of dangers while being parked there?

These and many more remain unanswered questions, and not ever likely to be answered as we have all moved on. Even more damning was the complete absence of a structured emergency response. On one of Nigeria’s busiest highways, the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, there was no visible ambulance, no trained rescue team, no medical evacuation protocol.

Instead, accident victims were left in the hands of well-meaning but untrained passers-by. The images of Anthony Joshua being manually dragged from the wreckage and handled without spinal immobilisation were chilling. Such actions, though driven by compassion, could easily have resulted in permanent injury or death. In functional societies, emergency medical services are not optional luxuries; they are integral components of road infrastructure.

In Nigeria, they are conspicuously absent. This failure raises fundamental questions about governance priorities. What is the essence of constructing highways without embedding safety infrastructure into their designs and operations? Roads without lighting, without speed cameras, without emergency lay-bys, without rescue posts, and without medical response units are not symbols of development; they are mechanised death corridors.

A highway that cannot guarantee basic post-crash survival support is, at best, an illusion of progress. The incident also resurrected the long-standing menace of stationary trailers on Nigerian highways. The narrative that the vehicle conveying Anthony Joshua collided with a parked trailer immediately invites deeper questions raised above.

Was the trailer parked in a designated park? Was it on the shoulder of the road? For how long had it been stationary? Where was the indication of the speed limit? These are not peripheral details; they go to the core of regulatory enforcement. For decades, indiscriminate parking by heavy-duty truck drivers has remained one of the deadliest hazards on Nigerian roads.

Countless lives have been lost after vehicles rammed into poorly lit, improperly parked trailers, especially at night. Just as containers improperly fastened to the beds of trucks fall on innocent motorists, cutting short their lives. The number of lives lost to this reckless consideration of road safety is uncountable. This is not a new problem, nor is it unsolvable.

During my tenure as Commissioner for Public Transportation in Lagos State, deliberate enforcement of traffic laws significantly curtailed this menace within the metropolis. Predictably, the problem merely migrated beyond Lagos into the Lagos-Ibadan expressway and other interstate corridors. Attempts by the Ogun State Government to establish trailer parks were undermined by operator indiscipline and weak enforcement. Today, trailers continue to colonise highways from Badagry to Apapa, from Oworonshoki to Tin Can Island, turning public roads into private parking lots and endangering lives and properties.

On many occasions, trucks carrying highly inflammable materials have emptied their contents on the highways, crashed into other vehicles or objects, and thereby exploding into destructive infernos, consuming precious lives and burning victims beyond recognition. This lawlessness persists because it is indulged. Equally troubling is the roadworthiness of many of these vehicles. A significant number of trailers on Nigerian roads are mechanical hazards, aged, poorly maintained, and structurally compromised.

Their continued presence on the highways is made possible only by compromise and corruption. Regulatory capture has ensured that enforcement agencies look the other way while citizens pay with their lives. The status of the owners of these vehicles in society has made the drivers of such trucks uncontrollable and seemingly above the law. No serious road safety reform can succeed without confronting this entrenched complicity.

Beyond vehicle condition and parking indiscipline lies the deeper failure of driver certification. Nigeria’s driver licensing regime is largely performative. Many drivers on our roads have little or no understanding of traffic laws, road signs, or hazard perception. Defensive driving, emergency manoeuvring, and risk assessment are alien concepts to the overwhelming majority of licence holders. The licensing process, rather than being a rigorous safety filter, has become a transactional embarrassment.

Until driver education and certification are fundamentally reformed, enforcement alone will remain ineffective. The Federal Road Safety Commission (the Commission) itself exemplifies the dangers of institutional overstretch. Burdened with interstate safety management, vehicle registration, number plate production, driver licensing, and enforcement duties, the Commission has become a jack of all trades and master of none. The chronic shortage of number plates, the hawking of official documents, and the proliferation of unlicensed drivers all point to systemic failure. This is coupled with poor capacity development of the officials. Professionalism is at the lowest ebb in the Commission.

That is best illustrated with the response we got from the officials immediately after the Anthony Joshua accident. Instead of focusing on its core interstate mandate, the Commission often dissipates energy in jurisdictional conflicts with state traffic agencies over intrastate control. This diffusion of focus benefits no one. There is an urgent need for presidential intervention to clearly delineate responsibilities and rationalise mandates. Interstate road safety alone is a monumental task deserving of full institutional concentration.

Emergency response systems, accident investigation units, trailer regulation, and highway surveillance should command the undivided attention of federal authorities. Anything less is an abdication of duty. Infrastructure quality also remains a critical variable. Many Nigerian roads, both highways and inner streets, are structurally compromised, riddled with potholes, poor drainage, and unsafe geometries.

When bad roads combine with reckless driving, unroadworthy vehicles, stationary trailers, and zero emergency response, the outcome is predictably catastrophic. Road safety cannot be achieved through enforcement slogans alone; it requires an integrated system where infrastructure, regulation, education, and emergency care function as a coherent whole. I must however, not pretend to be unaware of the poor funding of the Commission.

There is a need for extraordinary intervention by the government. Ultimately, the Anthony Joshua incident has merely internationalised what Nigerians have long endured in silence. It has reminded us that road safety failure is not accidental; it is the product of policy neglect and institutional complacency. The true tragedy would be to allow this moment to pass without any meaningful reform. If celebrity suffering provokes action where ordinary suffering did not, then at least some good may yet emerge from this tragic episode. Nigeria must decide whether its roads are instruments of mobility or theatres of death.

Until that decision is made and backed by decisive action, Anthony Joshua’s survival will remain an exception, while countless unnamed Nigerians continue to pay the ultimate price for a system that has failed them repeatedly. May I conclude by extending condolences to Anthony Joshua and the families of all those who lost their loved ones. May the souls of the needlessly departed rest in peace, whilst simultaneously wishing all our readers and Nigerians at large a happy new year.

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