Nigeria’s Missing Factor of Safety -By Kator Ifyalem

The entire country is now a hazard. You need only a drive to your work place or the market to confirm it. Lets start with the roads. A giant drainage manhole on a busy road, deep and open, with the cover probably stolen for scrap, is not treated as an emergency. It becomes a landmark that drivers learn to swerve around, pedestrians learn to step past it, and someone eventually puts a tree branch in it as a warning. That branch is the national risk-management system. The potholes follow the same logic. A road that destroys vehicle suspension, bursts tyres and forces them into oncoming lanes is described as “bad”, as though being bad were a weather condition and not a failure of some sort, may be in design, supervision or maintenance. The driver may be part of the hazard too, unlicensed, untested, and often exhausted, in a vehicle that FRSC has never really examined.

The hospital should be the place where risk is reduced. It is often where risk is concentrated. Power fails mid-procedure and a generator must be coaxed to life. No equipment. Specialists have become scarce, and the patient who survives the road to the hospital must now survive the queue. Then there is the elevator, which most people in functioning systems never think about. It is a machine with cables and brakes, only needing regular inspection by qualified personnel. Where that inspection is absent, the lift becomes a sealed box suspended on trust. People have died in lifts in this country, and the response has simply been a news cycle.

Aviation shows the same pattern at altitude. Recently, we read about an aircraft door that failed mid flight, a maintenance problem. In a country where ageing fleets already invite skepticism, the lesson is that safety is a continuous act and not a permanent state. A system that stops doing the unglamorous work will eventually be found out.

Now consider the other hazards we have normalised, because the list is longer than most people admit. Buildings come first, and here the problem sits literally underground. Structures go up across cities with no ground investigation at all. No boreholes, no cone penetration tests, no understanding of the subsurface profile or characteristics of soil that will carry the load. Foundations are designed on assumptions and hope. Add substandard materials, poorly supervised concrete batching, overloaded floors and unapproved storeys, and the collapse of the Ikoyi high-rise in 2021 stops being a freak event. Collapses like it are the predictable output of a system that treats site investigation as optional and building inspection as a negotiation. School buildings fail the same way. Children in Jos were buried in a collapsing classroom block in 2024, and the lesson has barely registered.

Fuel is the next hazard. Petrol tankers travel in poor condition along roads that were never built for them, and when one overturns, crowds gather with jerrycans. The tragedy of Jigawa in 2024, in which well over a hundred people died as a tanker spilled its load, was not mainly a story of poverty or ignorance. It was a story of a society where people have learned that an overturned tanker is an opportunity because formal systems have given them so little. Add roadside petrol vendors, filling stations wedged between homes and schools and the country is dotted with small explosive risks that no planning authority has ever mapped. People were seen recently in an area in Lagos scooping vegetable cooking oil from an overturned vehicle.

Then there is the generator, perhaps the most quietly lethal object in a Nigerian home. Because the grid cannot be trusted or often not available, millions of households run petrol and diesel generators, near bedrooms, in enclosed spaces, through the night producing carbon monoxide. Entire families have died in their sleep. We have normalised the cause so completely that its victims are reported as accidents, and the failure of public power supply is almost never named as the cause of death.

Electricity itself is a hazard in a second way. Low-hanging cables, exposed transformers, illegal connections and corroded poles spread across dense neighbourhoods and markets. Children play beneath live wires. Rain turns a street into a conductor. Fire follows, in markets with no hydrants, tight stalls and blocked access roads, where the fire service arrives late, with no sufficient capacity to check the fire.

Water brings its own danger, and I have written on this before. The unregulated borehole economy means that thousands of households drink water from sources that no one has tested. Contamination is often invisible until it is clinical. Further out, the same absence of oversight shows up in dams and flood defences. The failure of the Alau Dam in Maiduguri in 2024 was a reminder that water infrastructure fails when maintenance is deferred and warnings are ignored, and that the people downstream pay for whatever is the price.

The same story runs through the waterways. Overloaded wooden boats crossing rivers without life jackets, and capsizing is reported so regularly that the pattern should shame every authority responsible for inland waterways. I have seen recklessness in this area to even colliding ferries. On land, motorcycles carrying three passengers without helmets complete a picture of daily exposure that no insurance company anywhere would price calmly. Add counterfeit and substandard medicines, untrained and unlicensed personnel administering treatments in medical stores, and the scale becomes plain.

What connects all of this is deferred risk. Each item is a decision that was postponed, an inspection not carried out, a standard not enforced, a budget line diverted, a licence sold. The risk accumulates quietly, like load on a weak foundation, until a particular day, a particular rain, a particular fault, and then it is presented to the public as misfortune. Whereas, it is a bill that citizens are made to pay for work that was never done.

The most dangerous thing is not any single hazard. It is how comfortable we have become, adapting to everything. A society that steps around an open manhole every day without anger has stopped expecting competence, and institutions stop supplying what is no longer demanded. Normalisation is the real risk factor because it removes pressure, and without pressure nothing is repaired. So here is the question. Which hazard have you stopped noticing because you pass it every day?