BANDITS AND THE RAIL LINES
Security agencies should strive harder to secure the rails
Some 48 hours after its services were recently disrupted, the Abuja-Kaduna rail line was back on track with increased traffic of commuters even though some are still hesitant despite safety assurances by the authorities. The Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) had suspended services on the popular Abuja-Kaduna route after some bandits bombed the tracks on 20th and 21st October 20. The loud bang suspected to be an explosive device had damaged a section of the track and shattered the window of the driver’s compartment. Passengers were for several hours stranded in the dead of the night until another train came to their rescue in the early hours of the following day.
In recent years, the Abuja-Kaduna Highway, one of the most strategic roads in Nigeria has metamorphosed into a symbol of armed robbery, banditry, and kidnapping. In the process, many lives are lost, scores are injured, goods destroyed while apprehension about road travels became rather pervasive. That perhaps explains why since it started operations in 2018, services on the Abuja -Kaduna route has been in high demand. Like all rail services across the world, it is cheap, prompt and a mass transit vehicle for people and goods. But even more significant, the rail line provides escape for commuters avoiding the Kaduna and Abuja highway where nothing depicts the hopelessness of the situation more than the reluctance of even security personnel and other people in positions of authority to ply the road.
All over the world, rail is the most common mode of mass transit, both for short and long distances. In some countries like China and Japan rail transportation has been modernised with high-speed express trains that even compete with airlines. However, our experience in Nigeria has been that of a gnawing irritation and a chorus of lamentations about what used to be. Even though slow, tedious, and often overcrowded, rail transportation has been accepted as a means of transport as far back as colonial times where millions of commuters and goods of international commerce like cocoa, groundnut, rubber, were moved to the ports during the heyday of agricultural boom. Even more, the rail corporation was then a big employer of labour with more than 40,000 staff on its payroll. But against the dictates of common sense, and aided by a marauding group called haulage cartels, the rails were gradually neglected and later out-rightly abandoned until about a decade ago when the Goodluck Jonathan administration started to invest in the sector.
However, the recent attack on the Abuja-Kaduna rail service corridor has expectedly generated a new set of security challenges for the railway line and expanded the frontiers of the reign of terror in the country. Indeed, last May, many stakeholders had expressed worries over vandalism of the Itakpe-Warri rail line, which links Warri in Delta State to Ajaokuta in Kogi State and was inaugurated by President Muhammadu Buhari in September 2020. A viral video showed where some vandals used a saw-like object to cut through the rail line to a point where the pieces could be carted away, thereby exposing passengers to dangers. Some suspected bandits also recently vandalised rail tracks along the Kaduna-Zaria rail line. Those arrested were reported to be members of a syndicate that specialise in removing rail clips that hold sleepers and rail tracks together.
Last week, the Nigeria Railway Corporation (NRC) chief executive officer, Fidel Okhiria, promised more security measures to ensure the safety of passengers and the trains. While those measures are needed to rekindle the confidence of travellers, the authorities must also go after the vandals.
