The National Insurance Commission has donated 400 additional Gota phones to the Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD) of the Ghana Police Service to bring the number of Gota phones presented to 900.

The move is to help the police check the validity of motor insurance stickers on vehicles with the view to protecting lives and property.

Presenting the phones, the Commissioner of Insurance, Dr Justice Yaw Ofori, said the recent spate of road crashes had become a major concern for many Ghanaians as the rate of deaths and injuries had assumed an alarming rate, with over 1,034 deaths recorded in the first four months of 2021.

He said it was for that reason that the NIC wanted to ensure that all vehicles plying the roads were properly insured so that victims of those accidents could be properly compensated.

Read: Insurance Commission to deploy GoTa phones to check fake insurance stickers

Clamping down on uninsured vehicles

Dr Ofori noted that personnel of the MTTD had already begun an aggressive campaign to clamp down on vehicles with fake and invalid insurance policy stickers after they had been trained on the use of the devices during a nationwide series of Training of Trainers (ToT) workshops organised by the NIC.

Read: Fake insurance stickers

He said there were many vehicles plying the roads without any form of motor insurance, while some others which appeared to be covered had fake or invalid policy stickers.

“Some vehicle owners and / or their drivers are carrying with them fake insurance policies in violation of the law. While some may be ignorant of the modus operandi of miscreants in society perpetrating this crime, some others consciously purchase these fake insurance policies from some unscrupulous persons just because they are cheaper”, he bemoaned.

That trend, he indicated, put the lives of motorists, passengers and pedestrians at risk because there was no compensation for victims of accidents involving vehicles with fake or no insurance.


Continuous support

For his part, the Director-General of the Police MTTD, Commissioner of Police (COP) Mr Adu Anim, commended the NIC for its continuous support for the national cause, stating that the deployment of the Gota phones was already making the work of the MTTD much easier especially with regard to accident-related investigations.

“This is because the devices are linked to a national digital platform which creates an opportunity for data collection and analyses by all the stakeholders involved in ensuring road safety and traffic law enforcement in the country,” he said.