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By Steve Agbota
For port stakeholders and Lagos residents, the state has become a perilous landscape for container tragedies.
The general consensus is that the twin evils of extortion and lax enforcement fuel the accidents, often tragic.
Other culprits fingered are; poor road infrastructure, lack of weighbridges at the ports and rickety trucks doing container evacuation.
The horror has exposed glaring gaps in regulation, enforcement and public safety.
Only last Wednesday, tragedy was narrowly averted when a container tumbled onto a Lexus SUV at Toyota Bus Stop along the bustling Apapa-Oshodi Expressway in Lagos.
The harrowing incident unfolded around 6:35 p.m. when a Mack trailer, laden with two 20-foot containers, lost control. One of the containers toppled, crashing onto the rear of the moving Lexus SUV 350, bearing the registration number EKY 251 HW, leaving bystanders shaken and a couple counting their blessings.
Firefighters and rescue teams sprang into action, swiftly freeing the couple from the wreckage of their vehicle, ensuring their safety amidst the chaos.
In a similar act of heroism, on November 24, 2024, the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority came to the aid of a driver when a 40-foot container, heavily loaded, crashed onto a Toyota Camry with the registration number LSR 293 HJ at Mile 2, along the Apapa-bound route.
However, Daily Sun has learned that the average age of trucks transporting containers in the country exceeds 40 years, with many of them in poor, unroadworthy condition.
The relentless fall of containers has tragically claimed countless innocent lives across various parts of Lagos State. The Ojuelegba area, in particular, has earned a grim reputation for container accidents that regularly endanger and claim the lives of residents.
Time and again, containers topple from bridges, crashing onto unsuspecting passersby, often killing them instantly. Despite the wails of mourning and media coverage that follow, these devastating incidents continue to occur, seemingly without end.
The Mile 2 area, along with the entire stretch of the Apapa-Oshodi Expressway, the Mile 2-Badagry Expressway, and other areas surrounding the wharf, have become notorious hotspots for falling containers.
Beyond extortion and enforcement issues, stakeholders have pointed to several key factors contributing to the frequent container accidents. These include overloading, poor maintenance of vehicles, reckless driving, and speeding by truck drivers, alongside deteriorating road infrastructure, inadequate drainage systems, and trucks in disrepair with incomplete hooks.
Articulated truck driver Adeyeye Mufutau has raised concerns about the decline in safety standards for trucks carrying containers, attributing it to both the government’s indifference and the extortion drivers face from enforcement agencies meant to uphold safety regulations.
He held the Lagos State government, enforcement agencies, the Nigerian Ports Plc, and local hoodlums accountable for the rampant container accidents plaguing the city.
In his view, the frequent incidents of falling containers are a direct consequence of poor road conditions—arguing that if the roads were properly maintained, such tragedies would be far less likely.
He called on the Department of Public Works within the Ministry of Transport to take a more proactive and thorough approach in addressing the issue, emphasizing the need to rid the streets of the dilapidated trucks contributing to the crisis.
He said: “There is a need to ensure that security agencies on the roads are checked and stopped because when they are pursuing the truck drivers and in the process of running and avoiding the security agencies, the containers fall. Above all, the government should ensure the roads are fixed.”
Speaking with Daily Sun, the Chairman of Nedu Logistic Solutions, Kelvin Okechukwu, said there are many factors behind the falling of containers, adding that due to the economic situation, many of the trunks are not standard enough.
“That is one of the factors that causes the containers to fall. The second one is bad roads. When a container is fully loaded, and there are bad roads, it can lead to a fall.
The third one is overloaded. Some trucks are overloaded. They carry beyond their capacity.
“Some trucks carry as much as 50-60 tons. Trucks are designed to be 30 or 45 tons at most. So when they carry 50-60 tons, any small thing can make it fall. Another one is government agencies. Sometimes you see government agents chasing trucks that are loaded on the road. Sometimes, they even struggle to steer with the driver. When the trucks fall, you see them run away. It happens.
“Another one is towing. Sometimes, when the truck is bad, instead of allowing more officials to push it outside the road so that the owner can fix it there, they want to drag it to their office so that they can ticket or collect money. In the process, the trunk will fall. Towing a loaded truck is dangerous. So, these are the factors that contribute,” he said.
In minimising the rate of the accident, he said the governments and individual owners also have a role to play.
“When the operators are not making enough money to put their truck in order, it will always happen. They will be managing a truck that is not good and putting it on the road. Because they are hungry, their families are hungry, they just want to get something to take home to their family.
“They will know that the truck is not standard. Even the driver himself will know that the truck is not standard. They will just load it just to get something to feed his family. Before you know it, an accident or truck will fall. So, it’s something that some of them have solutions, some of them don’t.
“The officials of the government must sanction drivers or trucks that are not good. Once you give them money, they will turn a blind eye to it. The LASMA, the Road Safety, all of them, when trucks are not standard, they are supposed to prevent the truck from going to load in the terminal,” he explained.
A truck owner and the Secretary General of the Association of Maritime Truck Owners (AMATO), Mr. Mohammed Sani Bala, said the accident, generally, is unforeseen and unpredictable,
He added that events that happened within and outside the port environment resulted in deaths, injury and loss of property.
“And AMATO, as a solution, a safety-conscious association, we have been doing our best to sensitize our members on the need to adjust to safety regulation as it has to do with using container hooks so that the container will not fall, while the truck is in transit.
“So, in the course of our investigation, we discover a lot of factors that are responsible for this falling of a container, you understand. Number one is the lack of a weight bridge inside the terminal lack of weight bridge to know the actual weight of the wheel and whether the truck that is assigned to carry that job can carry it.
“And secondly, there are some trucks that can’t carry loads, high tonnage load due to misinformation, maybe the manager will not tell the truck owner, or the driver will not open up to the truck owner, this is the tonnage of the goods, for the owner to know whether the truck will carry it or not, they will just do a kind of business,” he said.
He said they would just run a business; they would not disclose the actual tonnage of the job to the truck owner for the truck owner to give a go-ahead.
According to him, sometimes, truck owners are misinformed by their drivers or managers, or sometimes, the agents will even bribe the driver to carry a load that he knows the truck cannot carry.
“At the end of the day, you know, the truck will fall with the goods on the road. Secondly, sometimes, the bracing of the load inside the container shifts. What we mean by bracing is what they used to brace the goods inside the container, maybe an iron frame or something to hold the goods, to prevent the goods from swerving or shifting inside the container, during positioning or offloading from the ship, or positioning for examination.
“This, the brace, you understand, the hook always shifts, so by the time the driver carries the container en route to the warehouse, if he enters any gallop, any road bump or climbing or ascending the bridge, if the goods inside the container shift to one side, the container will fall.
He said another factor is that some drivers deliberately will not tie their container hooks; instead of tying the container hook completely, some of them, due to negligence and carelessness, will not tie it all.
“We have reached an agreement with the VIO that any truck that is found with incomplete container hooks will be sanctioned, we had a meeting with the top leaders, with the General Manager of VIO, with legal states, any truck that is found without complete container hook should be penalized as part of our effort to minimize, accidents involving containerized trucks.
He added that bad roads and too many potholes are also responsible for the falling of containers on the roads.
“The activities of all these hoodlums, that are dragging steering with the drivers, in an attempt to collect money from the driver, you see them, trying to stop drivers while trying to collect money lead to falling of containers along port roads. We have video evidence and everything, and also, along the Badagry express road, they will be struggling with dragging steering with the driver, the driver will lose control, and the truck and container will fall, so these are major reasons why you see the trucks are falling with containers on the road.
“AMATO, as far as the safety conscious, we are not resting on our oars, we are embarking on a continuous safety sensitization exercise, from one garage to another, through our WhatsApp group, to sensitize our members on the need to adhere strictly, to safety measures, but in order to minimize a container accident on the road,” he added.
