This will be hard to see through in Nigeria, but it is an idea worth exploring: the families of the two sisters employed by the Lagos Waste Management Authority and crushed to death on Monday by a motorist trying to escape from officials of the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority should sue the Lagos State Government for vicarious liability. They should not only demand hundreds of millions of Naira in punitive damages but should also insist that the state make sweeping environmental management reforms to protect the road sweepers they subject to the hazards of the Lagos-urban dysfunction.

Now, I have been Nigerian for long enough to know how this new tragedy will go: top state officials will make all the right noises about how they regret the deaths, vow to prosecute the offender (and will probably do), and wait for the next incident so they can repeat the platitudinous spiel. The state lawmakers too will go into an overdrive with summons issued left and right but will get nowhere at the end of the knee-jerky vituperations. Like the executive, the legislative body will murmur complementary condolences and move on.

Now, I am not exonerating the reckless driver from his alleged crime, but the invisible hand that operated in the siblings’ unwarranted deaths is that of Lagos State. Between LASTMA and LAWMA, two government agencies that urgently need to revise their methods in the light of the casualties resulting from their operations, the unfortunate victims of Monday’s accidents hardly stood a chance.

As various news media have reported, the two LAWMA women (not yet named) were working at the Charley Boy section when a yet-to-be-identified motorist speeding away from extortive LASTMA officers lost control of his vehicle and ran over them. The two women, reportedly in their 60s, were also siblings.

Despite eyewitness accounts, LASTMA has washed its hands clean off the unfortunate incident by saying their men were uninvolved. First, there are too many cases of their officials causing mayhem on the road for them to be vindicated merely on account of their innocence plea. Second, there will likely be footage from several CCTVs in the area. Can they retrieve them to prove their men have nothing to do with the unfortunate incident?

In a society that values dignity and life, the inane practice of subjecting people to sweep the highways would not even exist. There is no cruder means of ensuring a clean urban environment than deploying thousands of men and women to sweep highways while dodging an unending stream of cars, trucks, and motorbikes daily. It is perilous employment; those not crushed or maimed by rogue vehicles spend all their working hours inhaling fumes, dust, and stench from Lagos’ polluted air and clogged drains.

When I pass the streets and see people—mostly women, and in the older age bracket too—sweeping the highways that even pedestrians are sometimes otherwise forbidden to cross for the riskiness, all I see is crass exploitation of poverty. The state directly exposes these people to death and disability on its ill-contrived road network. Sometime around 2012, then managing director of LAWMA, Ola Oresanya, disclosed that at least 57 street sweepers in Lagos were crushed to death by vehicles while doing their jobs between 2007 and 2010.

The Monday incident also recalls the similar deaths of Kikelomo Bamidele (who was also pregnant), crushed to death by a petrol tanker and “Bisi” who died when a vehicle reportedly driven by a military officer had a burst tyre and somersaulted several times before knocking her off the Third Mainland Bridge. There have been documented deaths in the highbrow districts (e.g. Osborne Road in 2018) as well as lowbrow ones (e.g Ojuelegba, 2019). Death comes fast and furious to the street sweepers, no matter the neighbourhood.

Those fortunate enough to survive a ramming by a vehicle suffer lifelong injuries and disabilities that might lead to them losing their jobs. Meanwhile, these are citizens who barely earn enough in the first instance. Multiple media reports have reported on—and emphasised—how these sweepers are poorly paid despite the hazards of their jobs. Those not rammed by oncoming vehicles pray daily against such eventuality while inhaling damaging dust and fumes. If these people eventually suffer health problems due to the nature of their jobs, what provisions are available for them regarding healthcare facilities, insurance, and disability claims?

One wonders: it is 2023, why have the managers of the so-called principal city of Nigeria not come up with less precarious means of street cleaning? Machines have long been invented for this task. They not only mitigate the risk to humans, but they are also far more efficient. Well, it turns out that Lagos State once came up with the idea of mechanised street cleaning under the Akinwunmi Amobode administration. Both the N576m allocated for the project and the noble intention of moving human sweepers to access roads instead of the highways went down a dark hole of corruption, inefficiency, and the sheer lack of accountability that typifies much of our public service.

LASTMA maintains a crude operational tactic of chasing fleeing cars (where they have an operational vehicle). So oppressive are their practices that when men of the Nigerian Army brutalised some of their officers months ago, many of those who commented on the incident could not look past their abuse to elicit some fellow feelings for them.

A wise man once said that where purpose is not known, abuse is inevitable. In the case of LASTMA, their catalogue of abuse stems from how they misconstrue their purpose. They tend to act as if ensuring the smooth flow of traffic across the state is secondary—or merely incidental—to sadistically extorting drivers and turning traffic offences into a key source of revenue. They are less concerned about tailoring their operations to produce the conditions that will ensure efficient traffic management; they just want to punish.

For a concrete jungle with a poor road network, lack of urban infrastructure, and a perennial dysfunctional management of facilities, Lagos punishes traffic offences too severely. They do not even factor the consistent diminishment of purchasing power into their charges. What they bill you for traffic offences, even the state itself cannot pay its equivalent as minimum wage.

So severe is Lagos’ punishment for traffic infractions that they proceeded to auction impounded vehicles last year. There are many heartless things that our leaders do every day to worsen life for the people they have already impoverished, and that was one of them. So morally unjustifiable were their actions that they backed down after facing much criticism. In March, when the governor was so desperate to be re-elected that he turned himself into a vote carpetbagger, they returned some impounded vehicles to the owners. For them to have buckled under the blowback that met their policy meant that they did not quite think it through, and they probably cannot connect the law that empowered them to auction vehicles to any reasonable procedure for ensuring traffic compliance. We are unlucky to be ruled by sadists who cannot invent enough means of making people cry.

While they pulled back on that one extreme action, the punitive order they have systematically constructed remains intact. What Lagos has facilitated with its traffic management is a system whereby the punishment is so severe that people would rather risk limbs and lives to escape their officials. The multiple recorded instances of people causing accidents because they were fleeing LASTMA officials have included LASTMA officials themselves. All the various incidents of accidents should have been enough for them to evolve their traffic management methods to be more humane, but no, they cannot think outside the small box of subsisting on people’s tears, sweat, and blood.