Naija Blog – No fewer than 50 passengers travelling from Lagos to Abuja on Sunday night endured a harrowing experience after their commercial bus, operated by Ekeson Transport, suffered a tyre burst and was discovered to have no spare.

SaharaReporters learnt that the incident occurred around 9:20 p.m. along the Ado–Igede Road in Ekiti State, a bushy and poorly lit stretch notorious for insecurity and frequent armed robbery attacks.

The bus, which was carrying over 50 passengers at a fare of ₦30,000 each, came to a halt after one of its tyres deflated. According to passengers, the driver and his assistants managed to roll the damaged tyre to Igede town at about 10:30 p.m. in search of a replacement, leaving men, women, and children stranded by the roadside.

“This is becoming too much. The same thing happened last month,” one of the frustrated passengers lamented.

Witnesses said the driver initially claimed he had lodged several complaints with the company’s management about the lack of spare tyres, but no action had been taken.

To worsen the ordeal, passengers alleged that the driver failed to provide them with updates about the situation and later disappeared from the scene entirely, forcing many to wait in uncertainty and fear as the night dragged on.

Relief only came much later when another Ekeson bus, which arrived at around 12:41 a.m., dropped an extra tyre. Passengers, however, complained that the tyre was old and without a rim. They had to improvise, fix it with a rim, and manage the journey in discomfort.

“Can you imagine that it was the second bus that dropped its own extra tyre, looking old and without a rim, that we had to fix with a rim and then managed to get to Abuja? We left the village around 2:32 a.m. It’s crazy that a journey of less than 12 hours took us 23 hours, as the bus crawled into their Jabi Park at about 1:40 p.m. on Monday for a trip that commenced in Jibowu at 3 p.m. on Sunday,” another passenger narrated.

The passengers, visibly angered and exhausted, called on transport authorities to investigate Ekeson’s operational standards, particularly the safety of its long-distance buses, accusing the company of endangering lives through poor maintenance and negligence.

As of press time, Ekeson Transport had yet to issue an official statement regarding the incident.