Nigeria bans large fuel trucks after deadly explosions

Lagos: Nigeria will ban large fuel trucks from its roads after a series of deadly tanker explosions killed hundreds in recent months.

Road accidents involving fuel trucks are common in the west African country and are often followed by people gathering to scoop up spilt fuel -- a precious commodity as the country grinds through an economic crisis. Explosions have ripped through many such accident sites.

From March 1 tankers carrying 60,000 litres (nearly 16,000 US gallons) or more of fuel are prohibited from using any of the country's roads, Ogbugo Ukoha, of the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA) oil regulator, said in a statement on Wednesday.

Ukoha said the ban will "mitigate truck-in-transit incidents" and "drive down the significant increase that had been recorded in relation to trucks and transit incidents and fatalities".

Fuel prices more than quadrupled after President Bola Tinubu removed the expensive subsidy that kept prices low for decades.

The economic crisis that has followed has pushed many to syphon off freely available fuel from accident sites despite the risks.

Frequent fuel tanker explosions have highlighted people's economic precarity as the reforms bite.

The government argues its economic policies are necessary for the long-term, but in the short-term they have sparked the worst economic crisis in a generation.

An explosion after a crash in Majiya, in Jigawa state, in October killed at least 147 people, officials said at the time.

"Everybody knows about the risk involved in scooping fuel when a tanker crashes but the level of poverty is too much to resist the temptation," Sanusi Lawan, a student, told AFP at the scene of the crash.

At least 98 people died in another explosion on a road linking the federal capital Abuja to the northern city of Kaduna.

A week later, 18 were killed when a driver lost control of a fuel truck and the crash sparked a fire.