Let us stop pretending. Nigerians are not merely bad drivers; we are a national emergency on wheels. It does not matter how many years a man has spent behind the wheel or how confidently he grips the steering. Put him on a road with other human beings, and whatever he thinks he knows collapses into pure, unadulterated recklessness.
The Nigerian driver is perpetually in a hurry to go nowhere in particular. He overtakes on blind corners. He treats traffic lights as decorative suggestions. He drives against oncoming traffic because, somehow, his time is worth more than your life. He honks as though noise were a substitute for brakes. And when the inevitable happens, he folds his hands, looks to the sky, and blames the devil.
This is not a stereotype. It is a pattern so consistent it has become a national trait. The proof is in how quickly our drivers crumble when they travel abroad. A man who has driven for twenty years in Lagos suddenly has to sit for tests and lessons in London, Toronto, or Berlin, because the truth is finally exposed: what he called driving was never driving at all. It was survival. And survival has no place on a road governed by rules. So he starts again, a beginner at fifty, learning what a stop sign means.
Then there are the truck drivers and the okada riders, the walking bombs of our highways. Trucks with failing brakes and overloaded containers barrel down our roads like rolling coffins. Okada riders weave through traffic with a casual disregard for both their own lives and everyone else’s, sometimes carrying three passengers and a goat, as though the highway were a circus. One wrong move from any of them, and entire families are wiped out before lunch.
We have normalised this. We shrug, we laugh, we say “Na Nigeria we dey.” But the blood on our roads is real. The widows are real. The orphans are real. The young graduates cut down on their way to interviews, the mothers returning from market, the children going to school, they are all real. We have simply stopped counting because the numbers have become too painful to acknowledge.
Unfortunately too, there are those who drive all day and sleep on wheels, putting the lives of passengers and other incoming vehicles in harms way. Jesus Christ!
The solution is not mysterious. It is not beyond us. Nigerian drivers must go back to the books. They must relearn the rules, respect the lanes, obey the signals, and understand that a vehicle is not an extension of ego but a machine capable of murder. Driving must be treated as a skill to be certified, not a right to be claimed. The licensing process must mean something. Enforcement must be real, not a matter of who can settle the officer at the checkpoint.
If we do not do this, we should not be surprised when the rest of the world looks at our driving record and quietly refuses to recognise it.
