Traveling At Night By Road In Nigeria, Versus The Same Experience In Australia: A Comparative Analysis
The Oasis Reporters
January 4, 2024
Nigeria and Australia both belong to the Commonwealth of Nations.
In the early 1980s through the 90s and into the first two decades of the 2000s, I was a resident of the city of Kano in North West Nigeria.
Kano is about 1200 kilometers from Nigeria’s commercial capital city of Lagos and business often made me commute between the two vibrant cities.
Most of my trips were usually by road and this enabled me to take in the picturesque view of the Nigerian exhilarating landscape. Most times, I traveled by night in buses to enable me to be in the offices or companies I needed to be in by morning since I may be turning around for a return trip to Kano at any time of the day when the bus is fully loaded.
At the beginning, it was fun and also very safe. The road trip would be through Zaria City to Kaduna and to Makera, Tegina, Jebba, etc unto Eiyenkori, Ogbomoso, Oyo to Ibadan. Then Lagos.
For many years, it was like that until it became very dangerous due to the activities of armed bandits who would shoot either to immobilize the vehicle conveying passengers or outrightly kill the driver and bring the bus to a halt for a robbery operation.
Frustrated, road travelers abandoned that route because a few years down the line, another route opened from Kaduna to the new Federal Capital City of Abuja and on and on to Lagos.
Within a few years too, bandits saw the new route as another opportunity for their business. Much later they could attack with impunity during the day, robbing, kidnapping travelers for ransom, killing and all the other vices added.
The Nigerian security forces have been stretched thin, trying desperately to curb this vice with any appreciable success because the military seems to need
sufficient modern combat equipment and Hi-Tech intelligence gadgets and enough aerial surveillance to do more appreciable jobs aimed at securing the nation from bandits.
All other parts of Nigeria are equally desperately challenged. And that is without a doubt.
In drafting this write up, a Nigerian resident of Middle Belt origin whose local government area is the vice grip of bandits who kill, maim and take over villages for destruction and cattle grazing, gave his experiences. Most of the villagers are in IDPs (Internally Displaced Camps) because they cannot venture into their own homes that have been occupied by bandits.
“Australia is very safe and most people prefer to travel at night as was the case in Nigeria, many years ago.
I have had cause to travel alone in my car in a forested area for about 30km around 2:30 am here, no one attacked me. I saw many cars on the way”.
Australia as a country has a robust military and they belong to security organizations like AUKUS, NATO etc. The continent of Australia is large enough to even have a country like Nigeria’s space which can be seen as the size of a state.
It may be vast, but criminal networks like Boko Haram and other terrorist organizations cannot be said to be there, overwhelming the continent and it’s security network. Should any such thing happen, they know how to rise to the occasion with robust security equipment
By Greg Abolo
