Data from the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) has shown that Kaduna leads the rest of the northern states in 2022 Road Traffic Crashes (RTC).
The data revealed that Kaduna State recorded 205 crashes with 810 injured people and 142 deaths.
Nasarawa State recorded 234 cases—580 injured people and 57 deaths while Jigawa State has 624 crashes—179 injuries and 44 deaths recorded by the corps.
However, this does not mean that these states have a worse road network. Benue State is the state with the worst roads in northern Nigeria, as most of the federal roads in the state have deteriorated beyond what can be managed by citizens due to years of lack of maintenance.
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Bisi Kazeem, the FRSC spokesperson, said on Sunday said a total of 4,387 people died as a result of road traffic crashes from January to June 2023 across the 36 states and the federal capital territory (FCT).
He said 14,108 injuries were also recorded, while 15,789 people were rescued unharmed during the six-month period.
Over the years, citizens have been subjected to gruesome experiences while plying roads across the region. Many have lost loved ones, and valuables, among other things, in accidents that regularly occur due to the decaying state of the roads and the recklessness of the drivers that use them.
However, it has now become a lifestyle for Nigerian drivers to learn how to manoeuvre their vehicles’ steering when driving on these bad roads.
Nigerian states have the largest road network. Nigeria has a road network of roughly 195,000 kilometres, of which about 60,000 kilometres are paved, according to the Government Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission 2019.
Most of the major road networks were built in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, the state of roads is degrading due to poor maintenance and the use of low-quality materials in repairs, thereby subjecting people to horrible experiences when travelling these roads.
Most major highways in Nigeria link the south to the north. They were built to transport produce from the hinterlands to the coast for export and connect the economies within different regions of the country.
