1 Is Road Safety Challenge a threat to Sustainable Development in Nigeria? A Review By Richard, Paul Chukwugozi MPDI, M.Tech (Proj. Mgt Tech.) Staff Officer, Federal Road Safety Corps Delta Sector Command, Asaba richard_78ng@yahoo.com, richard78ng@gmail.com Abstract Roads in the sub-Saharan region particularly Nigeria, are bedevilled with incessant road crashes and have generated a multi-stakeholder response to addressing the challenge. Despite various interventions of governments at all levels in the past, the issue still lingers. Will it be a threat to sustainable development in Nigeria? This paper reviews road situation in Nigeria vis-a-vis her economy and development. A systematic search of published literature was conducted. Peer-reviewed journals, literature (technical reports, government documents, etc) and internet articles were consulted for the review. The review found that the policies and programmes on road safety exist but the implementation lacked strong political drive and commitment like such witnessed in this COVID-19 era. This paper concluded that for the target 3.6 of Sustainable Development Goal 3 to be met by the end of this year 2020 in Nigeria, road safety challenge has to be declared a pandemic. Keywords: Road safety, crash, sustainable development, Nigeria, COVID-19 Introduction Generally, domestic travel in Nigeria is via road, rail, inland waterways and air but transportation by road remains the most dominant, accounting for about 90% of the total movements. The operational deficits of other transport modes within the domestic space continue to contribute substantially in making transportation by road highly dominant in the movement of people across the country (CILT, 2020). One of the negative externalities of heavy reliance on road transportation as a means of movement of people and goods is road traffic accidents (Independent, 2019). Every year the lives of approximately 1.35 million people are cut short as result of a road traffic crash. Between 20 and 50 million people suffer non-fatal injuries with many incurring a disability as a result of their injury. 93% of the world’s fatalities on the roads occur in low-and middle-income countries, even though these countries have approximately 60% of the World’s vehicles (WHO, 2020). The National Bureau of Statistics (2018) also revealed that additional 2623 road users died and 16903 others were injured in a total of 5008 RTC cases in the first half of 2018. In the last six months between February 15 and August 14, 2020, Nigeria had a total of 974 death cases due to COVID-19 with 36290 recovered cases (Worldometer, 2020). Based on the road traffic crash fatality trend in Nigeria between 1960 and 2017 as shown in Table 2, an average of 3,070 lives was lost in 6 months, which is far greater than death cases recorded due to COVID-19 in same country. In Vanguard (2018) it was reported that in May, 2017, the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) recorded that there is 33.7 (34) deaths per 100,000 people in Nigeria every year, making Nigeria one of the countries with the highest number of fatalities in Africa. It was also reported that as of March, 2018, the National Bureau of Statistics put the number of registered vehicles in Nigeria at 11,653,871. With an estimated population of 198 million, the vehicle per population ratio is 0.06. Since most crashes involve at least two vehicles, and given that 9383 crashes were recorded in