Ghana has never been the worst accident prone country

Koforidua, Oct. 20, GNA - The Executive Director of the Road Safety Commission, Mr Noble Appiah, has said Ghana had never been the worst accident prone country in the world.

He said the US records about 40,000 road deaths annually and Russia records about 25,000 deaths and these are higher than the 2,000 deaths recorded in Ghana.

Mr Appiah was speaking at the opening of a five-day road safety audit and management workshop for engineers in Koforidua on Monday. Mr Appiah said Ghana had the institutional capacity for better management of road safety but what was lacking was commitment and passion from politicians, policy makers and engineers.

He said a policy would be put in place to ensure that before any company was awarded a road construction contract, it would have to prove that it had staff who had attended a course in road safety audit.

Mr Francis Afukaar, Deputy Director of Council for Industrial Research (CSIR)-Building and Road Research Institute (BRRI), said road fatalities in the country had dropped from 40 deaths per 10,000 vehicles in 2000 to 18 deaths per 10,000 vehicles in 2005.

He said the Ministry of Transport, through the National Road Safety Commission, was determined to work hard to bring the fatality per 10,000 vehicles to a single digit by the end of 2010.

Mr Afukaar said the Ministry of Transport had developed a second medium term strategic plan to address the issue with concentration on safer roads, safer vehicles and improved road user behaviour so as to holistically address safety problems.