By Ojudu Babafemi
Have you noticed a troubling pattern on our highways? An alarming number of trucks, trailers, tippers, tankers and other articulated vehicles move freely without visible registration numbers. They rumble through towns and cities, cross state borders, and share the road with ordinary citizens — yet they carry no clear identity.
One is forced to wonder: if such a vehicle is involved in a crime, an accident, or a hit-and-run, how exactly is it identified? How does the law trace ownership, assign responsibility, or demand accountability when the most basic means of identification is absent?
More puzzling still is how these vehicles manage to pass through multiple checkpoints, toll points, and security posts without being questioned. Are they not required by law to be registered, or have the rules quietly collapsed under the weight of non-enforcement? When an unregistered heavy-duty vehicle kills, maims, or destroys property, who answers for it?
In a country battling insecurity, it is difficult not to ask whether this loophole serves more sinister purposes. Could anonymous heavy vehicles be aiding organised crime, illegal mining, fuel theft, or even the logistics of banditry? Why, in such an environment, are large, potentially dangerous machines allowed to roam our highways without traceable identities?
This is not a minor traffic infraction; it is a glaring governance and security lapse hiding in plain sight. Sometimes, what we learn to ignore becomes the weakest link in national safety.
Over to you, Nigeria Police Force and the Federal Road Safety Corps.
—culled from Ojudu’s Facebook page
