PHOTO: Heroic driver injures self, passengers while trying to avoid killing pedestrian
By Rotimi Akinola
In a bid to avoid ramming into a man who alighted from a bus “without looking around,” a tricycle driver got himself injured, even as all his passengers ended up inside a gutter.
But witnesses praised the heroic driver for doing the right thing. One of them went as far as taking him to a nearby pharmacy store and footing the medical bill.
The incident happened near the Oando filling station at Fola Agoro roundabout in the Shomolu area of Lagos State at about 8:50 a.m. on Saturday.
Chuks Okafor (not his real names) allegedly jumped down from a moving “danfo” bus before the driver could park at the designated bus stop.
He ended up in the middle of the road, and in the path of an onrushing tricycle driver who was thrown between the devil and the deep blue see.
“I had little time to react when I saw him,” Kabiru the driver said.
“But I was still able to avoid hitting him. He was trying to get out of the way but, unfortunately, was running in the direction I was turning. I kept swerving off the road until I and my four passengers crashed inside the gutter.”
“I injured a leg and my tricycle’s windshield cracked from the crash,” he said.
The affected passengers were furious. One woman among them prescribed some kind of punishment for Okafor for acting in a way that endangered other people. She was pacified by some elders in the area.
The elders also stopped some “area boys” from collecting N10,000 “damages” from Okafor.
Kabiru was taken to a pharmacy store nearby where his wounds were tended to. He was also given tetanus injection on an arm and one of his buttocks.
“I charged them N700 only,” Funmi Adewale, the nurse who treated him, told Newsroom on Saturday.
“One of the people who saw the accident happen offered to pay the bill,” she said.
Okafor apologized to Kabiru, and thanked the elders after the ordeal, another witness said.
