Hawan Kibo: Plateau’s accident-prone village nicknamed “many-have-gone”

At the base of the multiple hills that lead you towards Jos on the Akwanga – Jos highway is one of a large collection of villages called Kibo in the Riyom Local Government Area of Plateau State. This particular Kibo which bestrides the Akwanga – Jos federal highway collects you from the Akwanga end and […]

At the base of the multiple hills that lead you towards Jos on the Akwanga – Jos highway is one of a large collection of villages called Kibo in the Riyom Local Government Area of Plateau State.

This particular Kibo which bestrides the Akwanga – Jos federal highway collects you from the Akwanga end and wishes you luck as you begin the task of negotiating your vehicle through the road that snakes up round the valleys of the hills the way water finds it course round the lowest earth surfaces.

Hawan Kibo, so named with reference to the hills, has had such unenviable reputation for being frequently identified with road accidents that the name has become synonymous with such accidents and is consequently now also called Many-have-gone.

The multiple hills which describe the physical layout of the place make constructing a straight road difficult, so what you find is a road so winding that only careful driving may keep crashes away. And because drivers are not inclined to such careful driving, crashes are common.

‘Plateau accident claims 7’, ‘Auto crash kills 9 in Jos’, ‘5 die in road accident’ are some of the many reports you read in newspapers about accidents in and around Hawan Kibo.

A record of road accidents in and around the village is staggering. The record which is at the disposal of the Plateau State Sector Command of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) covers the stretch of road which begins from Maraban Jamma in Jos and passes through Riyom and Hawan Kibo and terminates at Forest Junction just after the Plateau-Kaduna border.

The road, less than 70 kilometres, forms a unit of the FRSC.  The record shows that in the 16 months spanning January 2012 and last month, 45 people died and 554 others sustained injuries in 160 accidents, the bulk of which occurred in Hawan Kibo.

“The tide has changed now, but accidents occurred around here almost every day in no distant past,” a 48-year-old resident of the village, Daman Sam, said.

“There is no problem down here,” Sam went on, meaning the Hawan Kibo village itself which lies in the plane immediately before or after the hills, depending on which direction you are travelling. He added, “It’s when climbing the hills or descending them that drivers get into trouble.”

Sunday Trust found after a couple of visits to Hawan Kibo that while it is common for heavy duty vehicles to break down while climbing the long hills and obstruct part of the single-carriageway to set the stage for a collision with other road users, the same heavy duty vehicles also frequently lose the break when ascending the hills and either drive off the road or into other vehicles.

In the same vein, the smaller vehicles stretch their luck on the dangerous bends by speeding recklessly, undermining their own lives and the lives of other road users.

A commercial driver, Adeolu Akim who said he routinely plied the Abuja – Jos route told Sunday Trust “Accidents happen here too often because not many drivers are as patient as I am; people generally ignore the reality that travelling this road requires patience.”

The bends that characterize the Hawan Kibo section of the Akwanga – Jos road are scary just to look at them, but it is even more scary for many who stand by the roadside to observe how motorists rush through.

“Many who ply this road, commercial and private drivers alike, tend to be overconfident when they come to these bends,” one such observer stated, continuing, “but some carry it too far too often and end up in a ditch or run headlong into oncoming vehicles.”

In constructing the road through Hawan Kibo, the engineers tried to mitigate the deepness of the valleys by filling them up as much as they found possible. The results are deep ditches on both sides of the road. The ditches are so deep in many instances that a plunge into them by motorists on either side of the road is almost always a plunge into the world beyond.

Such plunge is made frequent by the sharp bends and indecent haste that drivers make to turn them. The recommendation for safe driving comes in ample measure even for drivers travelling that way for the first time.

Mounted at various points of the most dangerous portions of the highway are posts signalling the bends and cautioning drivers to take things easy. One such signpost reads: ‘Many have gone on these bends. Slow down’. This, a warning that rymes so well with the reputation of Hawan Kibo, seeks to make motorists appreciate that the bends are sharp and many people have died in the course of negotiating them. Other signs read, ‘Stop your driver before he kills you’, ‘Slow down, only the living celebrates’, and so on.

But too many motorists do not heed the warnings. As the driver Adeolu Akim would say, “Not many drivers are as patient” as the road demands.

Recurring accidents have been the result over time. Many, indeed, have died from those accidents. Many more have sustained injuries with effects that would remain with the victims all through the rest of their life.

And even for a society that has gone numb on stories of deaths on Nigerian roads, stories emanate from Hawan Kibo which gnaws at the heart. One such story which remains fresh in the mind of many is about 17 young people who perished in the village three years ago when the bus conveying them crashed.

On January 25, 2009, 15 footballers of the Jimeta Football Club Yola, as well as their coach and another official met their death when their bus crashed into a gully while on the twisted road down the hill. The team had left Yola, Adamawa State, the previous day to honour a Division-One amateur league match in Abuja but ran into a curfew in Jos where security agents held them up and they had to pass the night in the Jos metropolis. They took off for Abuja the following morning but only got as far as Hawan Kibo where a crash halted their journey terminally.

From as far back as record would have it, statistics about accidents and deaths on the notorious highway tell of a huge toll on human life that bereaved families have had to live with.

“Considering the damage they have caused to families, it would seem as if not enough has been done to halt the accidents on this road,” owner of a chemist shop in the village who identified himself as PJ Samson reflected.

He said the rate of accidents had reduced from what he heard of, but that the authorities could still act to bring the rate further down. He explained: “When I complain about the accidents that I see or hear of, people say accidents were more frequent before. I came here about four years ago. It must have been terrible those years considering how bad I view them even now.”

He called for speed breakers as the only antidote to the perennial problem. “Drivers have proved incapable of accepting that accidents don’t happen to only other people,” he said, adding, “People tend to think that they are smart and can negotiate the bends with speed. Many have died in the dangerous haste. So, since you can’t successfully appeal to the drivers to slow down when they reach the dangerous bends, put up bumps and see how far they go.”

That is a message for the government. Bumps on highways is not something for an individual to do. Even Senator Gyang Dantong will be helpless here. Dantong, the man representing Plateau North Senatorial District under which Hawan Kibo falls did five years ago the caution signs that still dot the highway around Hawan Kibo.

He had said his action was to complement the work of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) in reducing the rate of road traffic accidents when donating the boards carrying various road traffic caution signs in 2007. He said Hawan Kibo was a black spot which had for years been claiming the lives of many citizens, and that the billboards would go far in alerting motorists to be cautious.

On its part, the FRSC has made moves to reduce the carnage on the Hawan Kibo highway. The Hawan Kibo axis, covering Maraban Jama’a through to the Forest Junction, remains one of a number of road stretches around the country on which the FRSC frequently deploys its officials to check highway recklessness.

In the Hawan Kibo village itself is located an office of the FRSC labelled Hawan Kibo Unit Command and Help Area. The unit serves both psychological and practical purposes, according to the Plateau State Sector Commander of the FRSC, Sunday Maku.

Maku spoke to Sunday Trust “We station the Hawan Kibo unit command to assist motorists on that road to avoid crashes. When they realize the presence of the FRSC on that road, they will drive more carefully. Secondly, our men operate from that unit so that in case of any accident, they can respond early and quickly to reach victims and offer necessary service. It is our effort to reduce response time. Our unit commands are usually located in areas that are prone to accidents and Hawan Kibo is one of them.”

How far have interventions such as those of the FRSC helped the Hawan Kibo accident profile? Samson the chemist said the rehabilitation which the Federal Government carried out on the Hawan Kibo highway last year did some good: “Potholes worsened traffic problems here because vehicles dodging those holes were constantly running into other vehicles, but that was ironed out by the rehabilitation of the road.”

He added however that a smooth road came with it a new problem: over speeding. “So, the real problem is indiscipline,” he said, explaining: “There are the bends, the hills and the ditches which make driving a testing experience, but if drivers will resolve to take the road as its peculiar nature demands, the accidents will not be so frequent.”