SURVEYS of the motor traffic system of the West African sub-region indicate that Ghana has one of the highest motor or road accidents per vehicle population per annum in the region.
To any objective and critical observer of the motor traffic system in the country, this is hardly surprising.
The level of indiscipline on our roads is, for want of a better description, simply mind-boggling.
There are a good number of people behind steering wheels on our roads who are “murderers” disguised as drivers.
To begin with, some of these people are not qualified or eligible to operate the vehicles entrusted in their care.
Many spot checks by the police have revealed that a good number of commercial vehicles operators (taxi and trotro drivers) either do not have driving licences at all or, when they have, they are fake, expired or, worse still, both.
There are many people behind wheels who have not gone through any driving lessons or test by an authorised institution or body so that it could be certified that they, indeed, qualify to drive.
Indeed, a good number of these drivers go through the back-door driving school by way of a few hours of driving lessons from individual “masters” on less busy roads at weekends and self-graduate as qualified drivers on our roads.
There are even some of them who, with exaggerated levels of competence and confidence, take charge of vehicles with heavier weight than they can handle.
Additionally, the disregard by many motorists for traffic rules and regulations, some borne out of ignorance and others out of impatience or sheer recalcitrance, contributes to the spate of road accidents in the country.
There had been situations where victims of accidents could have been spared if the drivers involved had just respected a red traffic light and stopped or not sped recklessly or did a wrong overtaking.
We have lost and continue to lose lives on our roads and the time to seriously check the madness on our roads is now.
Only yesterday, 18 students from a number of schools in Asante Mampong in the Ashanti Region sustained various degrees of injury when a 28-year-old driver of an Urvan bus ignored signals from the police to stop and ploughed into a procession of the students on a main road (see front page).
It is only a matter of luck that no lives were lost on the spot in this instance of reckless driving described as an accident.
We believe that a number of things, including strengthening our driver certification system, improving monitoring, enforcing the rules and letting our sanction regime work fairly, firmly and timeously, have to be done to nip these otherwise avoidable accidents in the bud and save the lives and limbs of our people.
We wish to acknowledge and commend the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) for instituting measures to reduce or eliminate the faking of its licences and also speed up the issuance of licences to those who qualify on examination and certification.
The DVLA boss, Mr Justice Amegashie, and his boys could extend this good work by rigorously checking the state of road worthiness of vehicles through proper physical examination before certifying them as road worthy. There are still a number of rickety or run-down vehicles operating on our roads and which poses a serious danger to all road users.
The MTTU, although working under difficult conditions, should endeavour to enforce road traffic regulations, not just reach amicable settlement with offending drivers and let them off the hook.
Once offenders are brought to court and found guilty and appropriately punished, many others contemplating similar acts will realise that it does not pay and, therefore, conform with the rules.
Above all, we all have to ensure that we make our roads safe for all road users to minimise, if not stop, these avoidable road accidents.
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