Safety costs money!
One problem I keep coming across is that there is no real, immediate way to absolutely prove to someone that you prevented an accident. So, the money you spend on safety can be taken to be an unnecessary expense, as it often is by the bottom-feeders in the aviation world.
Just look at the way people treat their vehicles in Nigeria. Who is goofy enough to strip down a perfectly-running vehicle just because it hits a certain mileage, throwing away perfectly good parts to replace them with new? A Mercedes hits 10,001 kilometres and falls over dead? Nah! Run that bad boy until it begins to knock; now you know it needs maintenance.
Same with the aircraft and the crews. You just extend the inspection intervals a little bit and then a little bit more, run the crews past their sim dates or over their duty times, ignore the deterioration in the engine performance... this sort of thing saves a lot of money and doesn't usually cause an accident, does it? This sort of attitude just kind of sifts in everywhere, like Harmattan dust.