NIGERIA-TRANSPORT: Help Underway for Injured Accident Victims

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

LAGOS, Oct 24 1996 (IPS) - People injured in traffic accidents are often left untended, so when itinerant trader David Odeon woke up in a hospital after a road mishap he considered himself lucky.

“I thank God and I thank the people that brought me here,” he told IPS at the National Orthopaedic Hospital here. “I was brought unconscious to this place on Mar. 16 when the commercial bus I was travelling in from Benin had an accident.”

Both his legs were fractured and they are still in plaster casts. “I am alive today because of the good Samaritans,” he said. “Doctors told me I would have died from loss of blood if I had not been brought to the hospital on time.”

Many other accident victims have died after spending hours in agony on the road because motorists refused to stop to help them. It’s not that Nigerians are callous. It’s just that few are willing to be hastled at hospitals or risk being detained by the police pending an investigation into the accident.

“I once took a motorcyclist who was knocked down by a hit-and- run car to the Orthopaedic Hospital,” banker Steven Ajulo told IPS. “I was forced to deposit my vehicle particulars until I produced a relative of the boy. I have since found it difficult to help accident victims.

“Nigerians have learnt not to care for accident victims. They have had the experience or read in newspapers what happens to people who try to help accident victims, how they get harassed by hospital staff and security agents.”

An official of the Orthopaedic hospital who preferred to remain anonymous admitted that “people are sceptical about helping victims because they believe that, instead of police apprehending perpetrators of the accidents, the good Samaritans are often punished with unnecessary delays and the seizure of their vehicles.”

“We used to seize their cars until they produced relations of the accident victims because in some cases we discovered that those who bring accident victims here as good Samaritans are the people involved,” she explained. “They often abandon the patients without paying for their care and bills.”

The official said, however, that when the hospital’s management noticed that charitable people were being unduly punished and that accident victims were thus being shunned, it ordered that staff should only record the names and addresses of those who bring in casualties.

“Many accident victims who would have been alive today have died because of loss of blood,” said a doctor at the hospital. “If they were taken to hospitals on time, blood transfusion would have saved their lives.”

Figures from the Federal Office of Statistics show that, between 1991 and 1994, 82,898 persons were injured in road accidents while another 32,589 died.

The high accident rate has been blamed on bad roads, the poor condition of vehicles due to a 10-year structural adjustment programme that has driven up the cost of spare parts and repairs, impatience and excessive speed by the drivers of commercial vehicles, drunkenness and drug abuse among motorists.

Now, commercial vehicle operators in this West African nation of 110 million people want to help. Their umbrella, the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW), in collaboration with the Roads Investment Development Company Nigeria Limited (RIDC), has launched a scheme to reduce avoidable road deaths.

The “Free Life Saving Medical Treatment (LISAMET) “is to save life rather than to allow accident victims to die of injuries,” said the RIDC’s Feyi Sobanjo.

Under the LISAMET scheme, the more than 16 million members of the NURTW are expected to take injured passengers to hospital, pay for their admission and treatment and then be reimbursed by the union at their motor parks.

According to Sobanjo, the scheme “will encourage more people to become good Samaritans as the use of NURTW drivers will reduce the hardship that some good Samaritans sometimes experience from hospital personnel and other agencies.”

The NURTW also plans to introduce a passenger insurance scheme before the end of the year.

Many here believe the LISAMET scheme will help cut down on avoidable accident deaths. But a doctor at the Orthopaedic hospital was worried that some drivers might abuse it.

“They can always claim they paid hospitals bills for accident victims and ask for a refund from the union,” he said. “We have had cases where such Nigerians have gone to solicit funding from some organisations to take care of accident victims only to disappear with the money so raised.”

But Sobanjo told IPS: “All vehicles belonging to members of the union will be used as patrol vehicles with LISAMET stickers on them to identify those in the project. Leaders at the various parks know their members, which makes it difficult for tricksters.”