Shell Galvanises Support for Proactive Road Traffic Management

 Shell office

by: Chineme Okafor

The Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) has thrown its weight behind proactive management of vehicular traffics across Nigeria’s road network, which is put at approximately 193,200 kilometres going by a 2004 statistics.

Managing Director of SPDC and Country Chair of Shell companies in Nigeria, Mutiu Sunmonu, stated at a workshop on road safety regulatory risk management for officers of the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC), Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) and Vehicle Inspection Office (VIO) in Abuja that the company had found current statistics on road accidents from the World Health Organisation (WHO) extremely unsettling.

Sunmonu who was represented by the Manager, Corporate Health, Safety and Environment of SPDC, Dr. Amadi Amadi, explained that with such statistics that place road accidents as the world’s 10th leading cause of all deaths and the ninth leading contributor to the burden of disease, as well as its potential to assume the third leading cause of global deaths, SPDC had thought it appropriate to initiate synergy amongst managers of vehicular traffic on Nigeria’s road network.

He noted that Shell would through measures such as constant education and training of road traffic managers, provision of traffic signage as well as renovation and restocking of emergency mobile road clinics across the country, seek to stem the rise in road accidents at the same time, reduce road crash deaths and injuries by 50 percent by 2020 in line with the “Safe Road in Nigeria” action plan of the FRSC which is a response to United Nation’s Decade of Action for Road Safety.

“Statistics from the World Health Organisation show that globally, road traffic accidents remain the leading cause of death by injury, the tenth leading cause of all deaths and the ninth leading contributor to the burden of disease.

With the highest mortality statistics being recorded from countries in Africa, it is time for all of us to do things differently; we can make a change if we make road safety a priority but this requires that we meet certain conditions such as having well trained road safety personnel and implementing efficient risk management systems,” Sunmonu said.

He harped on the adoption of the recommendations of the World Bank and WHO for initiation of sustainable positive attitudes as well as collaborative approach to road safety management through education of practitioners and cross relationship within the various management agencies of government.

He said: “SPDC is pleased to play a central role in this effort to reduce the number of fatalities and injuries on our road through regulatory risk management capacity building. We aim to have a safety performance we can be proud of and relentlessly pursue the goal zero in all aspects of our work including land transport.

That is why we support the federal, state and local governments’ road safety improvement.”