Mr Hammer, the Minister for Transportation observed a few weeks back that “fatigue, carelessness, poor visibility and speeding” were the prime causes of road accidents.

The minister also suggested a driver log book and the requirement that drivers should not drive for more that eight hours per day with 30 minutes break after every four hours to help keep our roads safe.

President Mill's has also contributed to the discussion.  His order for law enforcement agencies "to adopt effective and ingenuous but legal means to force drivers to obey traffic rules to prevent the carnage that had hit Ghana’s highways in recent time," might have been well put but not enough.

What is missing in all these remonstrations is the major factor of the causes of the accidents which happens to be the vehicle itself – the deplorable condition and the freedom with which their owners or drivers overload these commercial trucks.

How many times have we seen trucks on our trunk roads with towering loads, often off-centered and shifted perilously to one side, yet are able to pass through police barriers unimpeded by the authorities?  Or such vehicles that have up-ended in the middle of our roadways, with the content spread out on the road? The curved access to the Tema motorway at the Tetteh Quashie interchange is often the scene of trucks that have fallen flat on their sides because the overload they were carrying shifted!

Sadly, vehicle condition on our roads is one area that government can do a lot about and hasn't so far. Failure to do so effectively to date constitutes government’s complicity in the spate of accidents on our roads.

Very often, some of these accidents could tell us why they happened. Consider a single vehicle accident, no head-on collision, on the Accra Tema motorway in February 2009 in which eight people died on the spot, in daylight, and you will begin to understand the nature of the problem.

The Accra Tema Motorway is one of the better constructed roadways in the country and may even compete favorably with many in the world.

The motorway is safe in the sense that it is a dual carriage way, broad enough to carry two lanes each way, passes over no mountains, ravines or Alps. And the weather in Ghana is mostly stable all year round, with never an icy road condition or snow at any time. The motorway itself, for the most part, is a straight course of some twenty odd miles.

Then an accident happens on it and eight people die! The driver may have fallen asleep at the wheel, even in broad day light, but there are no road hazards to compound the effect.  No valley to fall into or cliff to fall off on, so why so many deaths?

Certainly, it cannot be the fault of the roadway. If it is, then heaven help us because we are not in a position to build a safer, more accident innocuous roadway in the near future. This fact must prompt us to look elsewhere for other factors.

That elsewhere is a defective vehicle which can easily be spotted at our ports, vehicles inspection stations and licensing agencies – all in the control of government.

Note that many of our commercial vehicles are imported. They are cleared at our ports daily. It is, therefore, at the ports that the proper regime should be put in place to separate road worthy vehicles, regardless of age, from unworthy ones.

Many who import these commercial vehicles into the country do so with entrepreneurial intent. They bring the vehicles in to sell. They buy at auctions overseas and pay cheap for insurance write offs. And after paying duties, taxes and vats, end up unloading these death traps on the market for profit. Given time, these vehicles of unsound frame and overloaded end up in piles of death on our roads.

But so bent is government on collecting the maximum revenue on these imports that the regime for proper inspection at the ports is forgotten or overlooked.

I am not aware of a governmental system at our two ports that uses the web to check for unsound vehicles from their point of origin, even though this can be done with no infrastructural cost to the government. 

The worldwide web provides access to sites for checking on vehicle history for a nominal fee. The fee, of course, can be passed on to the importer. All that is required at the site is vehicle identification number (VIN) of the vehicle being cleared (and, of course, the nominal fee).

Should the imported vehicle fail the web test, the government can then allow it to be cleared only for use as auto parts, but allow those that pass to be used as road worthy vehicles.

Of course, there will always be a human factor that can defeat the attempt to license only worthy vehicles for our roads within the described process . This human factor can be assigned the corrupt official tag for now until the same vehicle he or she cleared shows up in a serious accident later.

The problem of the corrupt official can be cured once an accident happens. The VIN of accident vehicle will again be put to the web test by officials. To counter check this, victims or their relatives can also independently verify the search on the Internet. And should the accident vehicle fail to pass the web test again, which web site is off-shore, not in Ghana, independent and cannot be corrupted, then the heavy hand of the law can be brought on the owner of the vehicle and the officials involved in the certification.

The charge should be serious. The culprits, owner and the certification officials, should be charged with the crime of murder if there were deaths involved in the accident.
 

E. Ablorh-Odjidja,Publsiher www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, March 21, 2009

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