Sympathies to the families of the people who lost their lives in an accident at Gomoa Okyereko on the Accra-Cape Coast highway yesterday and speedy recovery to the injured receiving treatment at the hospital. (See our lead story).
The story raises three critical issues that usually relate to accidents in the country— the nature of the country’s roads, driver misbehaviour and the lack of passenger power to check errant drivers.
The fact that the accident is a head-on collision involving a bus and a fuel tanker, obviously from opposite directions, means the nature of the road is a problem.
The bus was from Abidjan towards Accra while the tanker was travelling from Accra towards Takoradi.
The road from Abidjan toward Accra is the one and same single-lane road one travels towards Abidjan with places like Kasoa, Winneba, Mankessim, Cape Coast, Takoradi and Elubo on it.
In fact, it is part of the Trans-West African Coastal Highway, a transnational highway stretching from Nouakchott in Mauritania in the west to Lagos in Nigeria in the east and a busy one at that.
Every country on it is expected to reconstruct its portion, according to the related protocol.
This means by this time, Ghana should have reconstructed its portion into a dual carriageway at least, to reduce the accident risks on it.
That is also to say that the country should have reconstructed all the busy highways in the country into dual carriageways with over-passes, where needed, to reduce accidents and traffic congestion.
Let’s take stock of roads in the country on which road crashes usually occur such at the Accra-Kumasi highway, another stretch of a transnational highway for our landlocked neighbours like Burkina Faso and Mali, and we would realise that the single lane nature of such highways has become a serious risk factor in road accidents in the country.
It is better late than never and so the government should reconstruct such roads and save lives.
The loss of both productive and budding lives and the implications are too dire for families, communities and the country at large.
Besides the improvement of the roads, the government must persist in its efforts to provide facilities for other means of transport, particularly the rail.
As already hinted, the second issue arising out of the Okyereko accident is driver misbehaviour.
If eyewitnesses’ account that the Yutong bus driver was feeling sleepy and occasionally veered off his lane all through the trip is the case, then the driver did not regard safety rules.
He was tired and so must have rested for some time or handed over the control of the vehicle to a second driver.
These days we hear commercial buses going on long journeys have second or assistant drivers. Did the Yutong bus driver have one?
We reiterate our stance that there must be strict laws to check driver misbehaviour such as convicting a surviving driver of manslaughter if he is found to have caused an accident in which even just a life was lost.
Our last concern regards the lack of a law to empower passengers to, at least, persuade a drive to obey safety rules.
It is about time passengers too were empowered to play an important role in road safety.
