Highways are happy ways (IV)
We live in a world that is awash with all kinds of advertisements, all of them coming at us relentlessly from all available media. And that being the case, not
We live in a world that is awash with all kinds of advertisements, all of them coming at us relentlessly from all available media. And that being the case, not many of them stick in the mind after only a short period of time. Those that have been set to music tend to linger on longer than others and it is only a few newspaper adverts that hit that spot of no erasure and stay on the mind, sometimes maddennenly so for a long time after the message embedded in them is forgotten. On the other hand, there are some pithy adverts that simply refuse to die because unlike most, they are actually quite useful. One of such adverts was put out a long while ago by Pirelli, the Italian company that is famous for making vehicle tyres. That advert states simply but incontrovertibly that power is nothing without control. Think about that and you are likely to nod your head in agreement. Shakespeare, four centuries before Pirelli, made the statement that it is good to have the power of a giant but tyrannical to use it so. There is an obvious consensus between those two statements. Taking to the road on defective tyres is the greatest tyranny of all as it means the exercise of power with absolutely no control. That is a recipe for disaster.
Choosing a tyre to buy is like choosing a spouse to marry, at least in terms of consequences when that choice is badly made. A bad marriage may, in its own inimitable fashion, drag on for many years but in the case of fitting bad tyres to your car, the result is likely to be terminally swift as well as extending the tyranny of use to other road users. On Nigerian roads however, choosing a tyre or tyres is frequently an afterthought or no thought at all and this constitutes a danger to all and sundry whenever a badly shod vehicle is on the road. The danger is multiplied by several to many orders of magnitude when the vehicle is sent zipping along at tremendous speed as is often the case on Nigerian roads. Prayers or other forms of supplication are unlikely to be of any help in mitigating the effects of accidents caused by defective tyres. The mind boggles at the thought of how many defective tyres are attached to speeding vehicles on any road near you at this point in time. Nobody is exempt from the rascality perpetrated by the use of vehicle tyres which fail, often spectacularly and irreversibly on Nigeria roads.
Before our national vehicle was wilfully driven into a ditch at great speed sometime in the mid-eighties, the market for second hand tyres did not exist in Nigeria. Everyone who needed a tyre bought brand new ones at a time when at least two reputable tyre manufacturers were still plying their trade here in Nigeria, producing good quality tyres. I cannot resist making the comment that tyres produced in Nigeria at that time were superior to most of those that were imported and you did not have to break the bank to buy them. Today, those tyre manufacturers have fled from the harsh realities of the Nigerian market place and all available tyres now have to be imported from goodness knows where but countries in South East Asia readily come to mind. From that point of view alone the quality of tyres available to us is lower, sometimes much lower than what we had before. But that is only half the story. Many, if not most tyres that we now fit our cars with are imported fairly used. Just to be clear, these are tyres that have been taken off the wheels of vehicles in other parts of the world after varying periods of use. Nobody, no matter how affluent, is happy to discard a perfectly good tyre and so, it stands to reason that the used tyres available here will not stand up to any stern test for safety or durability. Those are the kind of tyres that are in use on Nigerian roads. There is no gain saying the fact that many of those can be classified as expired in all senses of that word and should be completely removed from circulation. But that is not the case here where only a small fraction of motorists insist on fitting reliable tyres to their vehicles. Not really out of choice it should be said, but because of the prohibitive cost of buying new tyres or a new anything for that matter. But, what do you know, Nigerians believe that you can fortify those tyres with prayers or with a few drops of alcohol to appease some god or the ancestors, wherever they are. That done, the safety of your travel is, by popular belief, assured.
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Once you take the wheel of a vehicle, the only contact you have with solid ground is through your tyres and the only control you can now exercise on your vehicle is through those tyres, worn or whole as they are. This is why tyres are of such tremendous importance. A great deal of research and testing have gone on over a long period of time, all in a bid to produce tyres which are supposed to guarantee both comfort and safety.The earliest tyres, if they can be classified as such, were made of wood which as time went on were bound with hoops of iron or steel to make them last longer. But, nothing could make them halfway comfortable and a solid improvement was made when it was discovered that natural rubber could be hardened by heating it with sulphur in a process which came to be described as vulcanisation. It was after this that rubber wheels were developed. But the solid rubber wheels of that period, even if they were more serviceable than the wooden wheels which came before them, were still patently uncomfortable. The next stage in tyre development led to the use of tyres which were filled with air to create a situation in which vehicles were riding on a cushion of air so that for the first time, riding in a vehicle became comfortable even when driving on rough roads as you frequently have to do in Nigeria. Just as important, riding on that cushion of air means that drivers could exert greater control on their vehicles thereby increasing the safety of road travel. But this is where the question of air pressure comes into play. This is so important that every vehicle manufacturer displays recommended pressures on each of their vehicles but here in Nigeria, those figures are strictly for the birds. They are hardly ever acknowledged, let alone respected by those people we, for no objective reason, call vulcanisers who are responsible for gauging the tyres on all the vehicles plying our roads. Conventional Nigerian wisdom which is no wisdom at all says that the harder your tyre is pumped, the better it would take you where you wish to go. This is a fundamental error which has led to the abrupt and bloody termination of too many trips. You start a journey on over inflated tyres and friction with the road surface causes heat and from elementary Physics, heat causes any gas within a confined space to expand and in doing so, creates an increase in the pressure it exerts on the walls of the vessel in which the gas is contained. Eventually, the pressure causes the vessel, in this case, the stressed tyre on your vehicle to burst leading to the loss of control. The damage caused by this is frequently proportional to the speed at which the vehicle is travelling at the point at which the accident occurs. It has to be said that this is one of the reasons why highways are no longer happy ways beyond a reasonable speed limit. Far from being happy, they become a playground for those blood thirsty spirits of our feverish imagination.
