The Federal Road Safety Corps says it has a target of reducing road accidents by about 15 per cent at the end of this year.
A total of 6,269 cases of accidents were reported by the corps in 2012 with 25,017 causalities, some of which fatal, serious and minor.
The Zonal Commander, RS8 of the FRSC, Mr. Denis Terrang, said the corps also planned to achieve a 50 per cent reduction in accident fatality by 2020.
According to him, corps will achieve the 15 per cent drop in accident rate as it intensifies its nationwide campaign of the operation obey the traffic law among all motorists.
Terrang spoke in an interview with journalists during the FRSC’s first quarter zonal retreat in Ilorin.The retreat was titled, ‘The dynamics of change as a tool for an enhanced productivity in FRSC.’ The zone comprises Kwara, Kogi and Ekiti states.
He also stated that the corps had set its own national road traffic casualty-reduction targets to be achieved by the end of 2020.
Terrang said for 2014, FRSC hoped to reduce road traffic crashes nationwide by 15 per cent and the fatality rate by 25 per cent.
According to him, this goal is to key into the United Nations Declaration to reduce traffic crash by 50 per cent by 2020.
He added that it was in line with the Transformation Agenda of the Gooluck Jonathan administration.
Terrang stated that the General Assembly of the UN had projected that road crashes were expected to be the fifth leading cause of death worldwide by 2030.
According to him, it is unacceptable that more than one million people around the world are killed in traffic accidents yearly.
He called on all road users to be more safety conscious and adhere strictly to traffic laws.
The Kwara State Commissioner for Works and Transport, Dr. Amuka Kannike, said road traffic crash remained a dreadful plague globally.
Kannike, who was represented by the head of the Kwara State Transport Corporation, Mr. Shuaibu Bolaji, noted that while the trend had been on the decline in most developed countries, most developing countries were still grappling with the problem.
He said, “In Nigeria, the road traffic situation has always been of concern to the entire citizenry, due to the imminent dangers faced by them while using the roads.
“It recorded the next highest to Ethiopia incidence of road traffic crash prior to 1988 at the global scale,” he said.
