The fall of a truck on Apapa bridge Wednesday brought back the agony of commuters in Nigeria’s premier port city, for which it has been in the news for years now.
Full business and economic activities resumed in the port city just a couple of days after the Yuletide holiday, but today, Wednesday, the city came to a standstill due to a snarling gridlock that kept motorists on the spot for several hours.
A MACK truck laden with a 40-foot container fell on its side while ascending the Apapa-Ijora Bridge, a few metres away from Leventis, blocking the entire outward lane of the bridge. This meant that all outward vehicular movement from Apapa has been impaired.
The effect of the gridlock and congestion affected traffic on Eko Bridge and other adjoining roads as far as Costain, Breweries and Oyingbo axis, paralysing economic activities in these areas.
When BusinessDay visited the scene of the incident, the Lagos state Recovery Unit (LRU) vehicle was seen trying effortfully to remove the truck and its container from the bridge. That was about 8hours after the truck fell with its container.
This simply speaks to the inefficiency of some government agencies. That the recovery unit was still working on removing a truck that fell by 4am says a lot about the response rate to emergency in this part of the globe, which is next to zero.
It also speaks to the importance that governance in Lagos in particular and Nigeria as a whole attaches to time in relation to business and economy. The magnitude of losses to this singular incident can only be left to the imagination. And it is not an isolated case.
