The incidence of crime on the nation’s highways, especially along inter-state roads, has continued to increase, becoming almost a daily occurrence.It has become so rampant that barely can a week pass without reports of robbery incidents, killings and maiming of innocent citizens along these roads.
The murderous gangs responsible for this despicable act kill with impunity. They mock the law, apparently, for lack of adequate security on most of Nigeria’s highways.
Homes of both the rich and the poor have not been immune from the nefarious activities of these murderous elements, who flagrantly violate any of their victims lucky enough to escape alive. Governors’ convoys have repeatedly been attacked in spite of their heavy security escorts, since they lack the kind of sophisticated weapons wielded by these bandits. In most cases, they move in large numbers to give warning signals to security agents that they are prepared for an all-out war.
The operations of these highway criminals have earned the country unenviable sobriquets in the international arena. Nigeria has been inappropriately labelled “A country in descent into the dark,” “A failed state,” “A land of no tomorrow,” “A country beset with insecurity across the land,” among others.
The most disturbing thing about this unfortunate development is the rate at which precious human lives are lost on the highways, not due to auto accidents, but through man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. This situation has become alarming, particularly, and in most recent times, along the Akure-Ilesa and AkureOndo expressways.
One of the precious lives lost recently to these agents of evil on the highways was that of Dr. Onukaba Adinoyi Ojo, a renowned journalist and an intellectual of high repute.
Till date, Ojo’s killers and those of the other victims, whose lives were cut short on our highways, still roam our streets free, because the long arm of the law has yet to catch up with them.
The prominent Nigerians and other victims, who have lost their lives to these highway marauders, deserve to get justice, not because of the manner of their deaths, but because of what they lived for, the services they would have further rendered to the country and what they would have become in the nearest future, respectively.
There is no gainsaying the fact that a lot of people have canvassed various reasons for the new wave of crimes on our highways. Some argue that since the police have abandoned their constitutional duties of protecting lives and property in all parts of Nigeria, the brigands have decided to take over the highways and lord it over hapless Nigerians plying these roads by visiting on them untold atrocities just to cow them into submitting themselves and their possessions.
Many others contend that the police have become more interested in the protection of their own pockets at the expense of the security of the lives and property of the taxpayers, from who they earn their salaries.
Again, the worsening problem of youth unemployment and economic recession is believed to have turned many young men to idle hands from whose rank these gangs recruit their army of brigands.
Unfortunately, Nigeria’s security agencies have not been proactive like their counterparts in other parts of the world, as these criminals are known to always be several steps ahead of them in terms of arsenal and strategy.
It is an open secret that today’s criminals are more sophisticated, mobile and a lot more cavalier. Their level of mobility has somewhat made many small communities near the interstate highways vulnerable to crime as it equally makes it harder to apprehend the perpetrators. Until recently, it was, perhaps, unthinkable that an individual or a group of individuals would waylay women on the lonely long stretches of the Akure-Ilesa Road, raping and eventually abducting them for ransom.
It is the same litany of woes usually recounted by travellers along the Abuja-Kaduna-Sokoto expressway and the Abeokuta-Igbo-Ora road axis traversing Ogun and Oyo states.
Often times, these heavily armed hoodlums mount roadblocks in police and Army uniforms such that it is now extremely difficult to differentiate between them and the real security personnel on our highways.
By now, police authorities should have identified the black spots along our highways, where the heinous crimes are being mostly perpetrated and deployed adequately equipped security forces to arrest the situation.
The Federal Government should, urgently, up its ante in securing the lives and property of Nigerians, by adequately equipping the security agencies, especially the police, with stateof-the-art arms, training and re-training them in modern weaponry, intelligence gathering and proactive policing.
It is when this is truly done that the security agencies can reduce the advantage now enjoyed by these criminals over them, and even move steps ahead.
The traditional way of maintaining paid informants by the police should also be resuscitated to complement community policing, which has now gone beyond the fad and has come to stay in communities across the globe. The culture of concentrating police personnel in big cities at the expense of the small towns and villages, should immediately be discouraged.
