The National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) in the Eastern Region has commenced a quiz competition tour to all bus terminals in the region to refresh drivers’ memory on ways to drive responsibly and to reduce carnages on the roads.
The quiz competition is being held among the various transport unions at the bus terminals situated at every district capital in the Eastern Region.
The road safety knowledge competition, which is dubbed in the Akan dialect as “Kwanso Ahobanbo Nimdie” will seek to make road safety education entertaining to the drivers and to offer rewards to those who would emerge winners at every stage of the competition.
Speaking to GhanaWeb in Koforidua, the Regional Assistant Planning Officer for the NRSA, James Agyekum, disclosed that in 2019 and 2020, the Eastern Region recorded disturbing numbers of road crashes which demanded swift efforts to help address the challenge.
“Ending Last year (2020), the figures we had for fatalities were disturbing. For the first quarter, the statistics indicated that fatalities were over 160 while the crashes were around 540. We noticed that they keep increasing. Even last year, the COVID -19 helped us. But statistics still keep increasing.
“Since drivers are our main stakeholders when it comes to the road safety business, we decided to put this programme together to help refresh them of the road signs and all that they had to go through before acquiring their licenses.
“We notice that some of these drivers have been driving for many years and never had a refresher course. So this is one of the initiatives to help us keep them on their toes so that our roads will be safer,” he explained.
According to James Agyekum, the quiz did not only focus on the drivers but that it focused on all classes of road users including the pedestrian, the passenger and motor riders among others.
“We decided to frame the questions in such a way that it cuts across and since we are at the terminals, everyone will get the fair share of the education we are giving,” he added.
Some of the drivers who spoke to Ghanaweb, though off-camera, expressed satisfaction about the quiz competition.
To them, the programme was entertaining and that it would go a long way to make them extra alert behind the steering against road crashes since the questions and answers would keep ringing in their minds.
Some of them were, however, of the view that the quiz questions should have been more advanced since most of them were too simple to answer.
