Eyes on the Ground: Trotro drivers prefer parking to following government directive

Some commuters were left stranded Monday morning in the Kasoa municipality as drivers refused to adhere to the government’s directive to reduce the number of passengers in their vehicles.

This comes after government directed that all commercial buses, reduce the number of passengers they load by one per row.

One commuter who GhanaWeb spoke to, said the driver of the bus he joined dropped them in the middle of the journey.

“The driver of the bus I was on dropped us in the middle of our journey. He complained that the number of passengers on board was too small,” he told the news team.

In their defence, the drivers said the loss they would incur by following government’s directive was too much.

One of them said “trotro picks 23 passengers and I load Tema and Ashiaman which is 10 cedis. I will run a loss of 60 cedis per trip if I work so I think it is better to park the vehicle than loading 12 passengers per trip.”

“I arrived from Obuasi at about 11pm and came out to buy bread this morning but found no bread seller here. The military officers asked where I was going to, and I told them. I wanted to operate my bus but there is nobody at this station,” another said.

Residents of Kasoa who are used to the daily crowded scene are yet to come to terms with the empty streets in the municipality.

“I’m surprised every part of Kasoa is calm because that isn’t the norm. The streets are so free now that I haven’t bumped into anyone which is unusual. The lockdown exercise is a step in the right direction,” one said.

The empty streets being recorded in the Greater Accra and Ashanti regions are in conformity to the partial lockdown of the country.

The directive for the exercise which was given by the president on Friday, March 27 2020, is to control the spread of the virus in the country.

By Sunday 29th March 2020, Ghana had so far recorded 152 cases of the pandemic with 5 deaths and 2 recovered cases.

The country had however not recorded new cases as at 6:00pm on Monday.