By Gbenga Onabanjo
IN project management and aviation, every serious accident triggers a structured “lessons learned” process. Systems are reviewed, failures are isolated, and new controls are introduced so that lives are not lost in the same way again.
Sadly, that culture appears absent in much of our everyday reality.
Following the recent crash involving AJ Joshua — from which he thankfully survived, though two of his close friends did not.
I travelled on the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway.
What I encountered was not reassurance. It was deeply troubling.
Only weeks after two lives were lost on this same corridor, trailers were still parked on emergency shoulders. Okadas and buses were still driving against traffic. Bus stops were still operating on redundancy lanes. There were no visible speed limit signs, no advance warning signs, no reflective panels on medians, and no meaningful lane discipline for slow-moving trucks.
In aviation, such conditions would immediately ground an airport. On one of our most important highways, they are treated as normal.
The Lagos–Ibadan Expressway was designed as a controlled-access, high-speed corridor. Its purpose is simple: to move people and goods safely between cities — not to function simultaneously as a local street, a trading zone, a truck park, and a pedestrian crossing. When these incompatible uses are allowed to coexist, fatalities stop being accidents. They become outcomes.
Modern expressways rest on three pillars of safety: engineering, enforcement, and information.
Engineering provides shoulders, medians, service roads, and breakdown bays.
Enforcement ensures trucks remain in their lanes, shoulders stay clear, and traffic flows in the correct direction.
Information — through signs, markings, and reflectors — tells drivers what to expect before danger appears.
On the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway today, all three pillars are visibly weak.
A broken-down trailer on a live lane at night, without reflectors or warning signage, becomes a moving wall of darkness.
A motorcycle travelling against traffic, unseen until the last second, becomes a projectile. A bus stopping on a redundancy lane turns a highway into an obstacle course. At expressway speeds, the margin for survival disappears.
The tragedy is not only that two young men lost their lives. It is that the conditions that claimed them remain firmly in place. That means the system has not learned. And what does not learn, repeats itself.
While this painful incident is still fresh in our collective memory, government must move beyond condolences to correction. Sweeping reforms are required — including proper access control, removal of roadside trading and activities, strict truck-lane discipline, functioning shoulders, reflective medians, clear signage, prohibition of unsafe U-turns, visible lane markings, removal of silt and vegetation from carriageways, and the re-introduction of weighbridges.
These are not luxuries. They are the global minimum standards for any expressway.
As a Road Safety Marshal, I believe we owe the victims more than sympathy. We owe them reform. There was a time when marshals actively patrolled our highways — enforcing speed limits, directing lane discipline, and ensuring broken-down or illegally parked vehicles were removed before they became hazards.
That culture of visible, proactive safety must return.
We can do better.
We must.