The Federal Road Safety Corps, Lagos State Sector Command, says it recorded 353 road accidents which claimed 75 lives in the state between January and August 2023.
According to the News Agency of Nigeria, the FRSC Lagos Sector Commander, Babatunde Farinloye, disclosed this during the flag-off of the 2023 Ember Months Campaign, which was jointly organised by the command and Guinness Nigeria Plc on Thursday.
Farinloye said that 603 others sustained different degrees of injury, some with permanent disabilities in the same period under review.
“These incidents constitute huge human capacity loss and high levels of trauma, social cost and other consequences that may change the course of several destinies.
“This is the essence of our continuous campaign and interventions. Nobody’s life has to be untimely terminated as an inevitable price for mobility on the roads.
“Today, therefore, we are flagging off this campaign to remind ourselves and unequivocally reiterate that crashes are self-destructive occurrences.
“We (the road users) are the prime causal agents; we are the victims and we must be the solution. And it begins with our mindsets and convictions!” he said.
Farinloye said that annually, over 1.3 million people die on roads worldwide with about 50 million others sustaining various degrees of injury.
The sector commander added that developing nations (including Nigeria) accounted for about 91 per cent of world road fatalities with nations losing three per cent to five per cent of their annual Gross Domestic Product.
He said: “For us at the FRSC Lagos State Sector Command, we shall be deploying the full capacity of the command for a multi-dimensional intervention.
“This is in the form of enforcement operation, traffic control, public enlightenment and education, point-of-load education and surveillance, strategic advocacy and help-area for emergency response during this festive season.
“Most aggressively and efficiently, we shall prosecute our programmes around the identified leading crash causative factors. Our vision for 2023 Operation Zero remains Zero Fatality.”
