Current Journal of Applied Science and Technology

The use of motor-cycles (Okada) for carrying passengers from one destination to another for commercial purposes has crept into Nigerian’s transportation activities and gradually becoming the most popular, possibly because it is faster especially when there is terrible holdups and can also drop an individual at his door step. Nevertheless, it has added greatly to the incidence of road accidents whereby special orthopedic departments are created in Nigerian hospitals to attend to the victims. The recklessness and misbehaviours of the Okada riders has been traced to substance abuse. This study, therefore, investigated the predisposing influence of Home factors, Negative self component and Peer orientation on substance abuse among Okada riders in Ibadan. Descriptive survey research design was adopted. A total of 300 participants were randomly selected from 10 Okada parks in Ibadan metropolis. Their ages ranged from 16-35 with a mean of 24.7. They responded to four validated instruments, namely: Animasahun [16] Crime Behaviour Factor Battery; Negative self component of Animasahun [49] Academic success barrier battery; Peer orientation scale of Gasa [50] and Miller [51] Substance Abuse scale. Three research questions were raised and the results showed that each of the independent variables has a significant positive correlation with substance abuse, while they jointly contributed a total of 58.4% to the prediction of substance abuse among Okada riders in Ibadan. Based on this, it was recommended that public lecture and sensitization programmes should be put in place to teach the young Okada riders about the evils of substance abuse, and also exposed to assertiveness training to boost their self component and to make them difficult to be influenced by bad friends. The intervention is believed to help in reducing the excesses of the Okada riders in the society.