Caboose

I’ve been meaning to do some research into road accident fatalities in Nigeria and have finally got round to it. People keep going on about how dangerous it is to fly here but I suspected the roads are much more dangerous.

Of course, statistics are difficult to get hold of and usually unreliable. The Federal Road Safety Commission has a little bar graph with some statistics (below). If you zoom in you can just make out that the deaths figure for 2004 was 5524, 15 people per day.

Take Bellview crash in October last year, in which all 117 passengers and crew died. The road deaths (from 2004) are equivalent to 47 Bellview crashes, nearly one a week. Given that it’s not uncommon for pedestrians or motorcyclists killed on the roads to be left lying I’d say it’s safe to assume that the road deaths are under-reported.

As a comparison, in the UK in 2004 the number of people killed on the roads was 3321 (source: Road Casualties Great Britain 2004). Given populations at that time of 59,834,300 for the UK (source: Office for National Statistics) and 128,709,000 for Nigeria (source: Unicef) that means that in 2004 about 1 in 18000 of the UK population and 1 in 23300 of the Nigerian population died in car crashes.

I’ve tried (but failed) to find statistics so I can compare the number of vehicles on the roads in each country.