Another tanker explosion. Another set of names we will never know. Another charred highway, soaked with smoke, tears, and regret. On Tuesday, at least 29 people were killed in a tanker explosion in Niger State. Reports say many of the victims had rushed to scoop petrol from the leaking truck before it exploded. It is not the first time. And if we are being honest, it will not be the last.

In August 2025, Mr Steve Ayodele of the Federal Road Safety Corps, Benue Sector Command, disclosed that 411 Nigerians lost their lives while scooping fuel from fallen tankers in 2024 alone. Four hundred and eleven lives gone in moments of desperation, erased by poverty, and forgotten by a system that forces people to gamble with death for a gallon of petrol.

But before we shake our heads in disbelief, let us ask the harder question: who are these people running toward danger, and why?

They are not reckless thrill-seekers. They are the ones at the bottom of Nigeria’s survival chain: the agberos and street boys who sleep under bridges, the petty traders and okada riders scraping through a day at a time, the mothers barely feeding their children, the men hustling for their next ‘2k’, the jobless youth scarcely getting by.

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When a tanker falls and begins to leak, it looks like luck spilling on the asphalt, a dangerous and fleeting opportunity. The kind that can mean a little extra cash to sell on the black market, or just enough cash just to skip tomorrow’s hunger.

They know it is dangerous. Everyone does. But poverty does not leave much room for logic, does it? When life is this hard, even fire can look like hope.

It is convenient to dismiss these incidents as reckless behaviour, to wonder why anyone would run toward danger with a jerrycan in hand. But look closer, and you will see that the people who rush to scoop fuel are those standing at the very end of their ropes.

So they grab their jerrycans, not because they do not understand the risk, but because hunger has a way of silencing fear. Many of them plan to sell the scooped petrol at cheaper rates on the black market, earning just enough to stay alive for one more day. It is a gamble; death on one end, survival on the other.

But it should not have to be this way.

The truth is, this desperation did not happen overnight. Since the removal of fuel subsidies and the sharp rise in living costs, Nigerians have been forced to find unconventional means of survival. Inflation has eaten into salaries, transportation costs have doubled, and the price of basic food items has gone from painful to impossible. The economic policies that were supposed to revive the country are choking those already gasping for air.

The government can issue all the safety campaigns it wants, but when poverty meets opportunity, even risky ones, tragedy is bound to follow. Until people can afford to live with dignity, they will keep running toward the flames. Because in their eyes, the risk of dying quickly sometimes looks better than the slow burn of poverty.

This is not just a story about explosions; it is a mirror of what Nigeria has become, a place where survival has replaced living, and danger has become a marketplace. Until we fix that, tanker explosions will remain less of an accident and more of a symptom.

Because in today’s Nigeria, some people are not running toward fire for greed. They are running toward it because, for once, they think it might pay.

Meiza Nigeria