Angry truckers on Tuesday barricaded the Oweto-Loko Bridge along the highway linking Nasarawa state to Benue state, North-central Nigeria.
The truckers accused soldiers of extortion on the highway that connects Keffi area of Nasarawa sto Agatu and Otukpo local government areas of Benue state.
The blockage caused several hours of traffic gridlock, leaving hundreds of travellers stranded.
A truck driver who identified himself as Yusuf said soldiers at a checkpoint in Agatu beat him with sticks and gun butt for refusing to part with ‘N2000 bribe’.
Narrating the difficulties motorists grapple with at the hands of law enforcement officers on the highways, a trucker who did not want his name mentioned said, “Truck drivers spend as much as N250, 000 on settling (sorting) soldiers, police, customs, drugs law officers on a single road trip from the southern to the northern part of Nigeria.”
The implications of this, the trucker said, is the hike in the prices of goods and services, which are passed on to the consumer.
“We were driving from Anambra State to Abuja. We normally give N500 to soldiers at checkpoints, but when we arrived in the Agatu area, the soldiers demanded N2000 per truck,” Yusuf told Premium Times in a telephone interview on Thursday.
“I got off my truck to remove the wooden log with spikes on the road after the boy who was helping the soldiers to collect money rejected our N500 offer. The boy resisted the removal of the log, then the armed soldiers came out and began to beat and injure all the drivers.”
Yusuf, however, said he could identify the soldiers who extorted the motorists, but that he was disoriented by the beatings and could not recognise the officers who allegedly tortured him.
He further narrated that the issue escalated when the locals ran into the village with weapons to attack the truckers.
“In the process of beating us, the soldiers and the village boys destroyed our vehicles; they broke several windshields and tyres,” Yusuf said.
He said it was the shattering of the trucks that compelled them to block the highway in protest until the governors of Nasarawa and Benu states – Abdullahi Sule and Hyacinth Alia – intervened in the crisis.
Reacting, the spokesperson of the Nigerian Army, Onyeama Nwachukwu, said troops were alerted of a traffic gridlock occasioned by a conflict between truck drivers and locals.
Nwachukwu said the locals, not soldiers, “inflicted damage on their trucks, while some drivers sustained injuries.”
“This led to the barricading of the road by truck drivers and resulted in a tortuous traffic gridlock,” Nwachukwu, a brigadier general, told Premium Times via a text message.
He dismissed insinuations that soldiers killed two of the truckers.
“Troops moved to the scene to prevent further escalation of the violence and successfully restored the flow of traffic on the road. (Premium Times)
