Name and shame: Nobody is above the law

On Friday, May 24, 2019, at around 1800 hours, I was driving home on the Akosombo-Tema road towards Afienya. There was virtually no traffic on the stretch from the Gbetsile junction to the Emefs Hillview area.

Suddenly, I see a black Toyota Land Cruiser with plate number CR 1130-17 speeding in the middle of the road behind me. There was no police convoy escorting it, nor did it have any red and blue lights or official GP (Ghana Police) license plate to identify it as a vehicle that had any right to do what it was doing. This vehicle, although there was absolutely no traffic on either side of the road, was straddling both the oncoming and opposite lanes, swerving left and right to force the other cars to veer off the road to avoid getting hit. This was incredibly scary, because trotros in particular like to park haphazardly on the shoulders, and importantly, pedestrians could be in the way.

Being forced to do this, and narrowly missing being hit by this vehicle made my blood boil, because I, like the average Ghanaian, have endured this nonsense for far too long. I reasoned that there was no way this was an emergency, because even an ambulance in an emergency would NOT have driven in such a dangerous manner, especially when there was no need to be swerving left and right.

The Land Cruiser was moving too fast for me to take a picture of their plate, and I decided to follow them and flag them down as we approached the Emefs Police Station. I kept blowing my horn, trying to get the attention of the driver, but I was ignored as the driver increased speed and kept swerving even more wildly, endangering more people in the now heavy traffic area towards the Akosombo-Afienya barrier. I eventually managed to overtake them and turned my car to block their path. At once five men started to get out of the car, shouting and banging on my car. One of them even tried to yank my side-view mirror off. I immediately turned around their vehicle and went back in the direction I came and headed for the Emefs Police Station, knowing they would take the bait.

They followed me there, and even tried to overtake me more than once, damaging the front of my saloon car. When we got to the station, they started insulting me, and tried to talk over me as I was making my complaint to the sergeant. We were redirected to the Afienya Police Station, and after we got there, these men kept trying to assert their “importance” by stating that they were government officials on government business. They even lied that they were in a convoy and therefore had the right to do what they did. I was trying to record this but had my phone literally pushed out of my hand by a police officer. At a point, one of them called a police officer friend of theirs to meet us at the station, and when this man, Sergeant Atsu came in, he initially did not bother asking me for my side of the incident, and told the men that they should have simply reversed into my vehicle, and gone ahead with their day.

He also basically told them they had the right to drive how they wanted. He also stated that he had less than an hour ago opened fire on an “aboboyaa” driver in public just because the man had not yielded to him. At this point I tried to record again, but only managed to get a few seconds of footage before one of the men in the Land Cruiser as well as a couple of police officers tried to bully me into putting my phone down. Eventually, other officers- ones determined to uphold their promise to serve and protect- came in and listened to both sides of the story. The men in the V8 could not provide proper documentation that would have backed their so-called right to drive in the middle of the road, yet managed to be let off the hook by throwing the usual “I am a big man in Ghana with plenty government connections “ tripe, by claiming they were with the BNI. However, the police offered to fix my vehicle, and took down their information.

This whole process lasted for almost two hours, and during this time, I endured countless sexist comments that included the opinions of some of the police officers that I was a female, so I basically had no right to complain. They also attributed my doggedness in pursuing the case to me being “emotional”, and I was told that this is Ghana, and “it is a lawless country and none of us can do anything about it”. This was from a police officer. The men in the Land Cruiser also told me that if I was a man, this would have ended very differently, alluding to the fact that they would have harmed me physically.

The road system in Ghana is a nightmare, with no proper law enforcement, maintenance, accountability etc. And nobody seems to care enough to do anything about it. Let me rephrase. Those who have the power and authority to make changes choose not to, because rather than addressing the problems that cause traffic, they can simply skip the inconvenience of traffic by cruising through the middle of the road, parting traffic like the Red Sea and narrowly missing pedestrians.

This practice has caught on so much that now, anybody with functioning hazard lights can do this, so it is no longer reserved for cars with actual emergencies. Owners and drivers of the Land Cruiser V series are particularly guilty of this false sense of self-importance. No surprise that these vehicles can 99.9% of the time be traced back to politicians or persons connected to the government.

Way too many accidents just this year alone have been the result of these entitled people wrongly using the road.