The road carnages: a pandemic that does not get the attention it deserves
A bus burning
There have been pandemics upon pandemics that have ravaged the world, Ghana inclusive. We can still remember the Ebola pandemic, which had a tolling effect on Africa and the COVID-19, which we are still battling with. In each of these pandemics, several steps were taken, and some are still being done, to curb or eradicate them completely. The President indicated last week that the government spent GHS17.7 billion on the COVID-19 pandemic. There was a coherent and all-out effort to stop it, and the government took drastic measures, which have helped greatly.
Read full articleHowever, there is another pandemic which has taken more lives than COVID-19 and which continues to take more innocent lives on a daily if not hourly basis.
This forgotten pandemic is road accidents. Hardly a day passes without us recording an accident on our roads, and many lives are being lost. Just last week, we were shocked to discover that 14 people were burnt alive in a road accident in the Western region near Cape Coast.
This is one of the statistics of the many fatalities that we record on our roads. We are not saying that this government and those before it have not taken action on this menace. We are saying that if we could put on the measures and the efforts that we took during the peak of COVID-19, we could have halted this menace.
We still have vehicles on the roads that are not supposed to be on the road. We elevated the Ghana road board to an authority and we believe that they should be seen as biting enough to deter people from breaking their rules.
The majority of our accidents are caused by parked vehicles on the shoulders of our roads. They do park on the roads because we don't seem to have enough parking spaces in most of our major towns. Broken down vehicles are supposed to be towed away, and the owners are supposed to pay for them later. But that is not the case now. These cars are left on the roads for days and weeks, which makes drivers run on them mostly at night.
There are also supposed to be speed limits that drivers should follow. These limits are not followed, they are violated, and the end result is the accidents that we record on the roads. We are thus calling on the government to give special attention to our roads. They should put the right structures in place to help save the needless deaths we record. There should be far-reaching measures which will go a long way to reducing the carnage. Citizens like me and you also have a role to play. We must obey all traffic rules and call out to order drivers and other road users who are violating road regulations.
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