Okada drivers have blazed an almost unbroken trail of blood, broken bones, and death. It is amazing that they are tolerated everywhere for so many years before state and municipal authorities finally work up the courage to restrict them to certain sections of town—or to ban them altogether.
But leaders who have the interest of the poor at heart should not stop with restricting or banning okada: they must go on to replace okada with an efficient, subsidized and inexpensive mass transportation system—which in turn requires the construction of a solid urban road network sufficient to carry the system.
What has been stated here regarding okada drivers applies in equal measure to the drivers of keke, the three-wheel motorcycle with passenger cab superimposed on it. Keke drivers behave just as irresponsibly. They are no more civil or law abiding. They too drive between lanes, weave in and out of traffic, and refuse to obey traffic lights. The cab does provide some protection for riders, but the accident records are just as discouraging.
Which is why keke is facing the same fate as okada. But it need not be. With a little effort, keke can be tamed and put to excellent use in our environment.
Invented in Italy in 1948 and popularized in India starting a decade later, keke has done yeoman service for half a century not only in India but all through East Asia, providing both human transportation and haulage. Known by dozens of names, keke is also popular in East Africa, Central and South America, and parts of Europe.
Both okada and keke are full of amazing possibilities. Each is in fact a tinker/mechanic’s dream. With a bit of imagination, an entire industry can be constructed on these two simple machines. To consider just one possibility, the okada can be so restructured that it becomes the towing-engine of a four-wheel mini-trailer comparable in size and function to a pick-up truck. The entire base and body of the mini-trailer can be constructed locally by our tinker-mechanics using assortments of cast-off steel beams, iron rods, plate metal, wheels and tyres. If such a domestic machine is not good enough for urban haulage, it should be invaluable in rural villages and farms all around the federation.
Keke is equally versatile, if not more so. A bit of research, even on the internet, will reveal the variety of uses it has been developed into in various countries. We can, for instance, convert keke into a mechanical work-horse to perform much of the wide variety of tasks assigned to larger and more sophisticated trucks in the advanced industrial economies. For instance, with a step-down in size of brush and scoop, a street sweeper machine can be constructed on keke (or even on okada), replacing manual broom-sweeping with a mechanized low-tech but more efficient process.
Even in this 21st century, we still must learn to walk before we can run or fly. Such elementary fabrication and construction process will provide a workshop, a first crude step in the progressively sophisticated technology adaptation and transfer which is the beginnings of “take-off” in industrialization.
And let’s raise the question once again: what really stops us from doing what some other nations have done for decades without shame but rather with pride—that is, to break open the various engines, study their parts and coordinated movements, buy or steal the machines with which to reproduce them, and then just do it?
This is targeted under-study; bald-faced copying; sophisticated imitation: precisely what Japan, China and India did—to name just those three giants.
What is stopping us from getting started doing the same? Even if we are to become experts in producing just one or two of the component parts of the finished product, leaving to others the other 998 parts, we must nevertheless have a deep productive knowledge of the beast-as-a-whole.
If we cannot turn the clock back to the days of innocence when we could close our borders to cheaper and higher quality products than the ones our fledgling technologies can produce, we are nevertheless left with no choice but to industrialize. We must industrialize for at least two reasons: most importantly, to provide jobs for our teeming millions; secondly, because a nation without an industrial economy, a nation that can only produce raw materials but has little or no capacity to process them nor to manufacture some of the things it needs—such a nation is an anomaly in the modern world.
We can start by turning our agriculture into an industrial powerhouse. Then there are petrochemicals—products processed from our abundant crude oil. And then there is straight, old-fashioned fabrication of machines and objects—which must meet or beat global quality from Day One if we are to sell to our own citizens not to speak of our immediate ECOWAS neighbors. But that’s the nature of the economic environment in which we must operate. Every developing nation today has the same challenges. So what’s keeping us talking instead of doing? . . . .
ojemie@s19080.p615.sites.pressdns.com/en
0805-209-7838
