Felele City Expressway; Kogi State Government to the Rescue

Felele City Expressway; Kogi State Government to the Rescue

The Federal University of Lokoja (FUL) community in Kogi state has been thrown into mourning after a trailer accident claimed the lives of five students of the school on monday at about 3:40PM.

The heavy-duty vehicle – carrying palm oil and firewood and heading to Abuja – rammed into a shuttle taking FUL students to school at Felele, Lokoja.

Which followed with a swift reaction from the school’s deputy Registrar of Human Resources who stated that “It is with heavy hearts that we announce the tragic loss of five of our promising students, who were taken away from us too soon in a fatal trailer accident” An incident which left the university community in deep sorrow and grief.

As a sign of respect to the departed students, the school has “declared lecture-free days effective from 12 noon on Tuesday, 18th February and all day Wednesday, 19th February 2025.

In the wake of the tragic incident, Kogi State Deputy Governor Salifu Joel Oyibl visited the school to commensurate with the varsity and assured the students that urgent measures are being taken to address the incessant ugly trend along Felele axis comprehensively according to a post on the school’s social media platform.

Despite Magnanimous interventions from the school management and the State Government the students continued to protest blocking the entries into the university. The university management acting on the directives of the various state security agencies issued a circular for the university to be closed indefinitely.

Felele has been known for this ugly incidents with notable accidents overtime even before the Federal University Lokoja came to situate it’s main campus in felele.
In 2021, there was also a tanker explosion killing students of Kogi state polytechnic, secondary school students and Lokoja International Market Women.

The Felele road is a road of federal Jurisdiction connecting about 10 states and the lead road to the Northern part of the country.
It is seeming to be impossible to either ban the movement of heavy duty trucks during the day time or stopping heavy duty trucks from using the road totally.
Matters has come to head for the government of Kogi State to take swift actions through the ministry of works as to reorganize the environmental arrangement by recreating the roads in a way that there can be a balance between heavy duty trucks, Moving Vehicles, shuttles, motorcycles, tricycles and Pedestrians as major causes of accidents on the road is brake failure and the excessive slop of the specific lane which these accidents has always occured.
The Kogi State government should also create a better synergy with law enforcement agents such as the Federal Road safety corps of the state to
enforce necessary traffic regulation, stop incessant speeding of vehicles and heavy duty trucks inter alia.

However, the actions of the students to continually protest after the university management and the state government has called for calm and assured the students of swift measures to curb the reoccurrence of such tragic incident is an act of indiscipline as no student reserves the right to shut down a university because of an incident that occured on an expressway leading to the school which is one of the natural disasters which is not controlled by anyone.

For the safety of the students of Federal University Lokoja, the residents of Felele we call on the Government of Kogi State to wake up and put an end to this dilemma that has persisted for decades and the recent one that involves young promising students of a university has made the whole matter come to it’s brim.
We also call on the students to be calm and put on the spirit of discipline for normalcy in the academic environment to be restored while waiting for the government to take executory steps to end such tragic stories as this.