The Federal Executive Council (FEC) has approved a new Nigerian Road Safety Strategy.
Minister of State for Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mr Clement Agba, disclosed this to State House correspondents at the end of the weekly FEC meeting presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari.
HE said the new strategy seeks to enhance road safety management, safer roads and mobility, as well as safer road users and post-crash care.
“I presented to the Federal Executive Council for ratification, the Nigerian Road Safety Strategy II, which is an update to the maiden of the Nigerian Road Safety Strategy I that was from 2014-2018.
“The NRSS II seeks to improve on the achievement of the first edition by further reducing road accidents and fatalities and instituting a basis for sustainable road traffic crashes and fatalities reduction. It also looked at the current road safety situation, articulates the desired road safety situation, design implementation of initiatives and programmes. And these Programmes and projects were estimated for implementation.
“In putting together the revised document, the NRSS I performance was assessed, benchmarking was done with other regions of Africa and the world in terms of road safety statistics as road safety strategies before the documentation was put together and costed.
“This has however been taken through the technical working group for review and the national economic council. So, what FEC did today was to ratify the decision of the National Economic Council on NRSS II.
Highlighting the difference between the NRSS I and II.
“There are four basic differences between NRSS I and NRSS II. One is the goal setting. For NRSS I, the reduction in road traffic crashes was to be by 35 percent by end of the year 2018, this has been pushed further and reduced to 50 percent by the year 2030. In NRSS I there was just one oversight advisory council which was at federal level, the national road safety advisory council. NRSS II has now set up state roads safety advisory councils in addition to the national road safety advisory council.
“Apart from the strategic activities defined in the pillars in NRSS I, NRSS II now includes a global framework plan of action. And then the documents that have been rephrased have now increased from four to about nine.
“The pillars upon which this strategy is based are road safety management, safer roads and mobility, safer road users which is very paramount, more important than the road conditions, safer vehicles and then the post-crash care,” he said.
