Curbing fatal road accidents conundrum

Ghanaians woke up last Monday to the sad news of another gory accident that claimed 31 lives on the Kintampo-Tamale highway.

The accident occurred at a spot between Dawadawa No.2 and Kawampe, about 30 kilometres from Kintampo in the Bono East Region.

A head-on collision between a Kia Grandbird bus carrying 12 passengers and some goods and a Mercedes Sprinter bus was all that it took for those precious lives to be lost in a rather bizarre manner.

So severe was the impact of the accident that the two buses caught fire, leaving 29 people burnt beyond recognition.

An initial report by the police attributed the cause of the road crash to human error, as one of the drivers was found to have slept while driving.

That fatal accident adds up to the thousands of lives that have already been lost to road crashes over the past few years.

For instance, in 2019, figures from the Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD) of the Ghana Police Service showed that road crashes claimed 2,284 lives across the country.

Most of those fatalities involved commercial vehicles, with 925 fatalities recorded, and 7,621 injuries.

The 2019 fatalities painted a bad picture about the worsening rate of carnage on our roads, as they were an increase over the 2,020 deaths recorded in 2018.

The 2019 figure was said to be the highest number of recorded deaths through road crashes by the National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) over the past decade.

The closest annual road fatality was in 2012 when 2,240 people lost their lives, while the least number of deaths, 1,802, was recorded in 2015.

In all, the figures show that road traffic accidents claimed 48,568 lives in 28 years, spanning 1991 to 2019, meaning that, on the average, 1,734 people are killed each year as a result of road traffic accidents.

Most of the road crashes usually involve commercial vehicles. For instance, in 2019, 925 of the fatalities involved commercial vehicles, with 7,621 injuries, while private cars accounted for 627 deaths and 3,302 injuries.

The Daily Graphic is gravely concerned about the increasing spate of deaths on our roads and calls for the root causes of the menace to be tackled head on.

Many of these crashes occur because of human errors and doing the wrong things, such as speeding, wrongful overtaking, drink-driving, driving for long hours and poor judgement on the part of drivers.

We can also identify careless and inconsiderate driving on the part of some drivers as one of the major causes of road accidents.

The bad road network, use of rickety vehicles and weak enforcement of road traffic regulations are also contributory factors to this road accident conundrum.

We are of the view that the time has come for a multi-stakeholder approach to be adopted to reduce, if not curb, the crashes on our roads.

Having attained authority status, it is important for the NRSA to speed up with the policies being developed to address the carnage on the roads.

The MTTD too needs to religiously enforce road traffic regulations in the interest of safety on our roads.

It is also paramount for driver unions to collaborate with statutory road safety institutions to build the capacity of their members on road safety.

Above all, it is our collective responsibility, as citizens, to join the campaign to restore sanity to our roads.