Taxi drivers sack toll collectors

Taxi drivers at the Sunyani main taxi rank have driven away Sunyani municipal assembly toll collectors from the taxi station. The drivers have said that they are not ready to pay daily tolls that the assembly collects from them.

According to them, they don’t see the benefits they get from the moneys they have been paying to the assembly since time immemorial. The drivers said the station, where they load passengers, is in a very deplorable state; the ground is full of potholes. And it is even worse when it rains. The whole place becomes flooded making it difficult to load passengers from there.

One of the drivers said: “Passengers refuse to come here to board our taxis; rather they prefer to pick ‘roaming’ taxis by the roadside. We are not allowed to pick passengers by the roadside, though we pay daily tolls of GH¢ 1 and a booking fee of 70 pesewas to the assembly every day”.

According to the cab drivers, several efforts by their leaders to impress upon the assembly to re-gravel and reshape the station for them have fallen on deaf ears. They insisted they would not pay the daily taxi tolls again until the station is reshaped.

DAILY GUIDE’s check really showed that the toll collectors had vacated their kiosks and the taxi drivers move in and out without paying anything. Speaking to the paper, the Public Relations Officer of Dumesua-Mentukwa-Ayakumaso Taxi Drivers Association, Edward Mensah, said there were over 1,000 taxi cabs operating from the station but due to the small space, the station cannot contain all of them at the same time.

Responding to the agitation, municipal spokesman, Edwin Kofi Darkey, agreed with the drivers but said efforts were being made to let a contractor come back to site. He disclosed that the work was halted due to the rains. He promised that the contractor would be called back to site to resume work.