Accidents On Our Roads

ROAD ACCIDENTS are gradually becoming a normal feature of our lives as Ghanaians. Even on our principal streets where tight traffic should ordinarily reduce the incidence of road accidents, we experience all sorts of funny and outrageous things happening on our roads.

Being hard and being smart has become the key to making it in the stressful traffic typical of urban areas, especially Accra.

Tro-tros and taxi-cab drivers whose only objective is to make their daily sales, speed and stop at random, leaving their noses still in the traffic and preventing other vehicles from going past them.

These acts of lawlessness are perpetrated with impunity, sometimes around places where police presence is imminent. On our main roads and highways leading to our regional capitals, the scenario is worse.

Light vehicles over-speed themselves to death and long articulated vehicles harass their less stronger and durable counterparts on the roads as drivers try to avoid deadly potholes by jumping into the lane of an on-coming vehicle.

We perpetrate all these acts of lawlessness, hoping against hope that nothing evil will befall us on the way. Instead of applying wisdom and care on our roads to help us prevent these accidents, we tend to rely on the prayers of quack prophets who jump from vehicle to vehicle mixing up the trading of their wares with the preaching of the gospel and prayer.

It is generally known that, of all road accidents that happen in this part of our world, over seventy per cent is attributable to careless driving.

We ignore sign posts and warnings on our highways and zoom ourselves to death in the process, in most cases dying along with innocent passengers, whose pleas for caution and care mostly go unheeded.

What we forget is that we are still a developing country still struggling to put in place the basic infrastructure to make life a bit more decent for our people. Road accidents do not only lead to loss of lives and property but also a greater loss in terms of productivity and natural wealth and development.

The Chronicle believes that our traffic laws are still too liberal and that may have accounted for the rising number of road accidents on our highways and in our urban settings. Thankfully our police are being helped in getting them more mobile to be able to deal with all manner of lawlessness on our roads.

The Chronicle would, therefore, urge the police, as it engages in its patrol duties on the highways and in the urban centres, to stamp their authority and ensure that drivers who break basic driving and traffic regulations are brought to book.

What we need, therefore, is greater vigilance and stiffer penalties if we have to check this madness on our roads.

Education and awareness creation appear not to be going far enough to arrest it; perhaps, being tough will do the trick.