naptu2:

Bimpe, her husband and their six-month-old baby were returning from a social function when their car had a head on collision with another vehicle somewhere in Ajah, Lagos.

The baby who was sleeping on Bimpe’s lap was immediately ejected through the windscreen

Mustay: As usual, Nigerians are also of the habit of not reading manuals, we seem to be proving the theory of "put in a book if you wanna hide it from them" right.

Methinks many are thriving in ignorance.

In spite of sustained campaigns by the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) to promote safety on the Nigerian highways, LEADERSHIP SUNDAY, findings reveal that most road users still throw every caution to the winds while driving. Such people find it very difficult to adhere to the rules of child road safety. Kehinde Ajobiewe and Chibunma Ukwu write

It is common to see a child in the front passenger seat of a car without a seat belt on. Meanwhile the driver of the vehicle which could be either of the parents or the family driver is strapped with his seat belt. This sight goes a long way to show just how careful adults could be with the children. The adults prefer to protect themselves against the hazards of the roads but do not think it is necessary to give equal protection to the children. Parents have the mentality that it is only children between the age of 1 year and below that need to be strapped carefully in their special car seats while in a vehicle. Children above 1 year are usually left carelessly to jump around inside the vehicle while the parents and other adults are carefully strapped with seat belts for the fear of being arrested by Federal Road Safety Officers.
Parents are not the only ones who have neglected the duty of child safety on Nigerian roads. It has also been observed that both primary and secondary schools within the country don’t pay attention to the issue of child road safety as they convey their pupils in buses without making efforts to strap them with seat belts while the driver and teachers carefully strap themselves Also, parents allow their children to jump around inside the moving vehicles when the adults are safety strapped and protected with seat- belts. In an effort to change this attitude of child neglect on the road, and to complement the efforts of the Federal Road Safety Commission -FRSC, a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), the Arrive Alive Road Safety Initiative (AARSI) put together a child safety campaign called “click it: why risk it”.

The NGO which has its base in Lagos also involved the Universal Board of Education (UBE) in Abuja, with a promise to take the message to all the states of the federation. Director of ‘Arrive Alive Road Safety Initiative’, Mr. Yinka Bello, who is also a representative of Chevron Nigeria Limited, told LEADERSHIP SUNDAY that child safety is a critical element of road safety because children are the hopes of tomorrow. According to him: “All known measures for safety on the road should involve the children. For instance, we have been told to use our seat belts because when you are strapped to your seat belt and you are moving in a vehicle, in the event of a crash the seat belt will help to protect you. The question we are asking today is, do the children deserve to be protected? “ In the same vein, we have been told to use our helmets when we are riding on a bike, but the riders wear their helmets, but when they are carrying the children, they put them behind without helmets.
In the events of a fall, the helmet is meant to protect your head, but here we don’t do that, we leave our children so exposed to whatever happens, and we are saying enough”. Bello observed that the majority of schools in Abuja use “school buses that are not internationally recommended to convey students to school. “A survey recently conducted by the Federal Road Safety Commission in Abuja, revealed that most schools use mini-buses which fall below recommended standards,” Bello said. He also said that a survey by the FRSC revealed that most government schools have no buses. “According to the FRSC’s report, 86 per cent of the private schools studied have school buses, and it was observed that only 33 per cent of government schools have school buses,”.
He also said that children under the age of 12 years should not be allowed to occupy the front seat of any vehicle. According to him they are not mature enough to handle hazards of the air bag, if the air bag inflates in an accident. The balloon can choke a child while adults can easily struggle out and draw in some breadth. The child cannot do anything, more so, when the child is in shock, so we say don’t carry a child on the front seat”, he said. Mr. Bello added that his company, Chevron , which is also the sponsor of the campaigns, counts it a privilege to get involved in such campaign. “We in Chevron took it as an opportunity to get involved in child road safety campaign.
In Africa, parents do not take the necessary precautions towards child safety. While driving, you see children jumping around inside moving vehicles, and we all know that the roads in Nigeria are bad” “Our programmes at Arrive Alive Road Safety Initiatives are national, we started it in Lagos and we aim to affect every part of this country, the incidence that triggered off this happened in Lagos so we launched it there in July, 2011 and very soon we will go to other states”, he added.
The director, however, called on the government to ensure that laws which uphold road safety measures should be extended to children. The government, he averred should ensure that school buses imported into the country met the standard in the western world. According to him, “In western world, school buses don’t come without seat belts. The government can make it a law that every vehicle that will be used for school bus must have seat belts so that children can be strapped”. In his own reaction, the acting Head of Unit, Special Marshal and Partnership Department, Mr. Peter Gyang Pam disclosed that the FRSC has laws that protect children.
According to him, “we in the FRSC, owing to the Establishment Act 2007, we captured it a long time ago because we see the children as a vulnerable group. And their parents too will always advocate that we teach them all the ideals, so there are laws that protect the rights of the children and they are being implemented”. Gyang lamented that the level of awareness on child safety was still minimal. “It is not everybody that knows these things but we are trying to take the message to the grassroots so that everybody will know, because it won’t do anybody any good if you formulate some laws which people are not aware of”, he added. The Executive Director, Accident Prevention and Rescue Initiative, Prince Fidelis Nnadi, disclosed that World Health Organisation (WHO)’s statistics showed that frequent vehicle accidents on Nigerian roads claim the life of a child every three minutes.
“The World Health Organisation (WHO) statistics confirms that a child is killed in an accident every three minutes in Nigeria, and that about 42 per cent of the children are killed by reckless speeding, drunken motorists and distractions like the use of cell-phones”, he said.

info@lpf:
Child car seats are not, to the best of my knowledge, required by law in Nigeria.

Freiburger:
What do you mean with not required? So kids does not deserve any form of security just because they can't take decisions on their own. The government should do something about this.

Personally, I have seen on Nigerian roads, parents driving vehicles with their kids on their laps; a mother sitting on the passenger seat with a child on her lap; a child of about five years left ‘unguarded’ playing in the passenger’s (front) seat – unknowingly, whilst these adults think they are showing the children love, their children would love them more if they knew more about child safety (and pass it on to their own children later on).


Generally, a child can sit in the front seat using the adult seat belt from the age of 12. Prior to that age, if a child is about seven to eight or is of a certain weight or height, s/he can use a booster seat on the front seat. However, the safest approach is to have a child sit at the rear (back seat) till the age of 12 – this is because an exploding airbag can “deliver a massive blow to the young child’s head, causing instantaneously severe fatal to human brain trauma” (Bloch, 1998).

A research conducted by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that “among children under the age of 10, fatalities were 34 per cent higher than expected in frontal crashes. The deaths of three infants and 11 children were attributed to air bags during the study”. Safe Kids, a UK child-safety website, gives the following explanations: “Children of that age (seven) and even older have not fully developed and cannot withstand the force with which the airbag is released. This is because their back, neck and stomach muscles are weaker than that of an adult. A child’s head is also out of proportion to the rest of their body which makes it harder for them to keep an upright position during collisions, resulting in their body being propelled further forward than an adult and thus increasing the impact as they hit the airbag.”

Essentially, when an airbag explodes, “the great forces produced by an inflating air bag can injure or even kill a child”. Furthermore, researchers have estimated that by putting a child in the back seat instead of the front seat, the chances of injury and death are reduced by more than 30 per cent.

Well, these are for seats with airbag. As a kid, our car did not have any airbag and the reality is that in Nigeria, we still have many cars like that (both old and dumped). I remember how we were always cautioned whenever we turned on the hyperactive button or how my parents used to warn other road users if, for example, a child was peeping out of the window or ‘unguarded’. Airbag or no airbag, I was being protected from fatal accidents. A scene from a movie depicting how one could easily be flunged out of the windscreen when hit at the rear readily comes to mind. For the scenarios provided above, the steering wheel would easily become the dangerous tool in injuring the child who’s between the driver and the wheel thus, clogging the wheel of progress of such child. For the second, the individual ‘lapping’ the child would simply become a basketballer throwing the child like a ball outside the windscreen and just like the second, the last kid left ‘unguarded’ may find himself or herself performing a deadly ‘Shina Rambo’ stunt – these are why they are termed accidents. They were never planned for. Just as risks cannot be totally eliminated, they can be reduced via our safety consciousness.

It’s interesting to note that Section 3 (6) of the Lagos State Traffic law, for example, states that “where a rider is convicted for riding or driving on restricted routes … carrying a pregnant woman, a child below the age of 12 years or an adult with a baby or heavy/large load placed on the head or acts which obstruct normal sitting on the motorcycle, the passenger shall also be liable to the same penalty”. It is the responsibility of adults to protect children. The school bus drivers too should take note as it is usually the case that children are jam-packed in school buses.

Mustay: As ridiculous as his statement may have read, it's quite true. A lawyer I asked was not aware of any law regarding them hence, the reason I asked @naptu2 for that article for FRSC quoted some laws there. Perhaps, a lawyer can disprove that.

Mustay: Ok.
Yeah true but common sense ain't common after all and some adults driving children are not always their parents.

Mustay: Ok.
Yeah true but common sense ain't common after all and some adults driving children are not always their parents.

Sam Milla: Judging by what i see some drivers do, and how difficult it is to get a driving permit here in Nigeria,
I would say at 18 years.

pappilo: Story story. No be Naija ni. When I was a child, we used to roll 5 children deep in the back of my dads Datsun 200L. When the older siblings grew a likkle bigger, the last born had to make do on my mums laps no seat belt or nothing.