To speak of Dangote Group is to speak of a paradox. On the one hand, the company has become a towering symbol of Nigerian ambition. Its cement silos rise like monuments to industry, its sugar and salt traverse our borders, and its payroll feeds countless households. Indeed, by sheer size, Dangote is one of the largest private employers in Nigeria, a corporation whose reach extends beyond Lagos and Kano into the economic bloodstream of Africa itself. It is no exaggeration to say that many kitchens, from Maiduguri to Monrovia, are sustained by its commerce.

But blessings, if unchecked, often curdle into burdens. The company’s trucks, painted in corporate colours and lumbering across our highways, have become both carriers of commerce and, tragically, instruments of carnage.

A series of devastating incidents involving Dangote trucks has cast a sombre pall over Auchi, Edo State, this month, prompting a grim public reckoning. In one tragic event, a young graduate was left with severe injuries following a crash on August 14, with the company pledging to cover her medical care. Just three days later, on August 17, another Dangote Cement truck was involved in a multi-vehicle collision, a catastrophe that claimed three lives. These sorrows are not random misfortunes. They are signposts of a pattern, suggesting that profit has too often been weighed more heavily than prudence.

If Auchi’s grief is local, its meaning is national. The Nigerian highway is already a theatre of disorder: potholes gape like wounds, traffic laws are observed mostly in the breach, and enforcement is episodic at best. Into this chaos roll the long convoys of Dangote trailers, massive machines steered too often by men whose impatience, fatigue, or inadequate training turn them into dangers on wheels.

Across states, headlines accumulate like tombstones: another accident, another family broken, another life needlessly lost. A single life, as Soyinka reminds us, is the kernel of eternity. To lose it to carelessness is to barter eternity for nothing. Death comes to all, yes, but it should come by nature’s design or lawful inevitability, not by the negligence of corporate drivers thundering down federal roads. No economic contribution, however grand, absolves a company of the duty to preserve life.

Here, Burke is useful. He once described society as “a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection… not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”. Companies, no less than governments, are bound by that partnership. To shrug at the avoidable loss of life is not simply poor corporate governance; it is a betrayal of civilisation’s most basic contract.

What, then, is to be done? The answer is neither mysterious nor utopian. It begins with responsibility. Dangote Group must not regard its drivers as mere operators of machinery but as custodians of public trust. Orientation must be rigorous, retraining frequent, and monitoring uncompromising. Breathalysers, speed governors, GPS tracking, rest-hour enforcement, these are not luxuries but necessities for a company of such scale. In the Philippines, cargo hauliers were once notorious for fatigue-driven accidents; reform came only when electronic logbooks and enforced driver rest were introduced. Why should Nigeria accept less from its largest haulier?

The state too cannot remain aloof. For too long, the government has been complicit through silence. Sanctions, when they come, arrive as perfunctory fines, little more than rounding errors in a company’s accounts.

What is needed are penalties that sting enough to compel reform. A corporation that spends millions polishing its image but pinches pennies on driver training is not a responsible partner in development.

But let us not deceive ourselves by narrowing the lens too tightly. Recklessness on Nigerian roads is not a Dangote monopoly; it is a national epidemic. From rickety minibuses in Onitsha to gleaming SUVs in Abuja, road abuse is woven into a culture of impunity. To condemn Dangote alone is to treat a symptom while ignoring the disease. We need a comprehensive rethinking of road culture: consistent enforcement of traffic laws, courts that punish negligence swiftly, and a citizenry that respects the sanctity of life.

History suggests we can reform when the shame is strong enough. The aviation sector, once synonymous with crashes, became safer only when both regulators and airlines realised that each crash was not a statistic but a national disgrace. The same seriousness must now be applied to our roads. To accept otherwise is to concede that Nigerian lives are cheap, that progress can be tallied in cement bags and revenue sheets while coffins multiply on our highways.

Dangote Group, by its scale and influence, cannot plead smallness. It is more than a company; it is an institution. And institutions must be measured not only by what they produce but by what they preserve. To build is noble, but to protect is sacred. The wealthiest company in Africa should not find itself indicted in the court of public opinion as the continent’s most dangerous road user.

The question, then, is not whether Dangote can afford reform. The real question is whether Nigeria can afford its refusal. If a nation cannot keep its citizens safe from the wheels of its commerce, then no monument of cement or empire of sugar can mask the truth that it has mistaken profit for progress.

Nigeria’s tragedy is not a lack of vision but a lack of will. We know what to do, but we recoil from doing it. Reforming road safety would require a seriousness of enforcement, a rigour of training, and a constancy of monitoring. These are not technical impossibilities; they are failures of resolve. And yet, if we cannot guarantee life on our highways, all other ambitions (industrial, political, or cultural) become grotesque. For what is a nation that cannot protect its citizens from the very arteries of its commerce?

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