Few weeks ago, Ladun Odejobi, a manager at an electronics store at Allen Avenue, Ikeja, Lagos was on an official appointment to Ibafo when she had a punctured tyre along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. But that day, a stopover in her Pathfinder SUV at a vulcaniser’s spot at Warewa, could have caused her a terrible accident or worse, killed her.

“All the work on the tyre took less than 50 minutes and I was on my way. I remember that while he was inflating it, I told him to gauge the pressure of the other three tyres to make it the same. He told me all of them were 40 and he made the tyre he worked on 40 too,” she said.

According to her, she noticed that while she was on her way back from her appointment, any little increase in speed affected the stability of the vehicle. She said, “I immediately knew that something was wrong. First of all, my vehicle which used to be a well-balanced SUV, was bobbing here and there.

“I was not speeding but it was literally bouncing with every increase in speed. I had to reduce my speed to the barest minimum till I was able to reach the service station that I use at Ojodu.” Odejobi said she found it hard to believe when she was told that the problem with her vehicle was simply a tyre.

“When the pressure of my tyres were gauged, I thought the man was joking. While three tyres gauged below 40, you won’t believe that the tyre the man on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway worked on gauged 51! “The man then showed me a number on a label on my door jam of the vehicle. It reads 33. He said, ‘Madam, if you travelled a long distance, there is no way you wouldn’t have had accident because the tyre will blow out’. I felt like an illiterate because I never knew about any recommended tyre pressure. The vulcanisers always told me 40 was good and I always trusted that all of them knew what they were doing.”


A motorist, who gave his name simply as Lamexx shared an account of his experience with over-inflation of his vehicle tyres. He explained that even though the recommended pressure for his SUV is 32 psi, vulcanisers pump
his tyres to between 50 – 60 psi even when he tells them 32 psi.

According to the Federal Road Safety Corps, one in 12 road accidents in 2015 was caused by burst tyre. The corps had indicated that out of 9,000 road crashes recorded that year, 772 were caused by burst tyres. But how many of these may be connected to roadside mechanics?

Source: Punch, Saturday, 25 June, 2016.