The reported deaths on highways rose from 4,537 in 1973 to 8,000 in 1977, giving us a daily average of about 22 deaths. We all know that these are caused by excessive speeding, lack of proper maintenance of vehicles, drunkenness, and complete disregard for highway rules and regulations

— Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, August 18, 1978, at the opening of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway

Decades have passed, but Yar’Adua’s words still resonate, perhaps more urgently than ever. Nigeria’s roads continue to claim thousands of lives yearly, but the crisis is not just about potholes or poorly lit expressways. It’s about us. Our choices. Our behavior. Our everyday relationship to rules, to one another, and to the spaces we share.

Across the country, roads are misused with astonishing regularity: cars speed recklessly, weave dangerously, and ignore basic traffic laws. Drivers operate vehicles under the influence, often with little or no training. Pedestrians dart across highways, bypass pedestrian bridges, and walk in live traffic lanes. These avoidable actions turn ordinary commutes into mortal risks. Yet when disaster strikes, we instinctively point fingers outward, blaming government, infrastructure, or fate, without looking inward at the culture of neglect and indiscipline we have normalized.

Yes, our road infrastructure is inadequate. It reflects decades of neglect, corruption, and poor governance. But broken roads don’t drive themselves. Bad governance doesn’t force anyone to drink and drive. The deeper issue is the erosion of civic care, the quiet, everyday responsibility we owe one another as citizens of a shared nation.

We tend to imagine governance as something external, delivered from above: policies written in Abuja, laws passed, projects announced, and enforcement carried out by uniformed officials. But governance truly begins within. It begins in the choices of everyday citizens, the way we steward public spaces, the regard we show for strangers, the discipline with which we approach rules designed for our collective good. When citizens abdicate these small acts of care, governance collapses at its foundations.