To Mamfe and back — A case of the police ‘thinking’ outside the box

I had the “unpleasant duty” of ferrying my niece to school at Mamfe from my abode at Ablor Adjei in Ga East on Wednesday,January 3, 2024.

Having passed Ayi Mensah toll booth around 11:40a.m, my hope was to land at Mamfe in the next 40 minutes or so and return to my desk by 2p.m. Unpredictably, some five minutes into the journey from the toll booth, I suddenly bumped into a gridlock. 

Faulty vehicle

Thinking a vehicle had developed a fault as the cause, I inched towards the convoy. Many vehicles had broken down on the stretch either as a result of fuel shortage as I witnessed a few refuelling manually or as a result of overheating.

For over two hours, I was still in the queue and had not sighted the gate of the Peduase Lodge.

When I finally sighted the Peduase Lodge gate after 2pm and headed to Aburi, then I found all the answers to the gridlock at one of the gates to Aburi Girls SHS (ABUGISS) - Aburi Girls’ shs was reopening, so the entire commuting public on the stretch must be inconvenienced - Wao!

On my return journey from Mamfe, the value was the same, the gridlock was a few metres to the Aburi “Y” Junction, heading down south from Akuapem Ahwerease.

This traversed up to some few meters from the Aburi Girls SHS.

It is worth mentioning here that the Police cum their assistants spotting black T-Shirts were dotted in and around ABUGISS executing their colonial traffic management style of “stop and go”, while the shoulders of the road on both sides of the stretch remained “fallow”.

Back to Accra, I complained bitterly to a colleague whose daughter was once at ABUGISS. I was made to believe that, that had been the status quo (indeed) anytime the school reopened, vacated or there was anything connected with parents visiting the school.

I observed at the ABUGISS gate that both vehicular traffic entering the campus and those heading in the opposite directions were all in the convoy, thus until there was room for a vehicle entering ABUGISS to enter, one had to wait.

Thinking outside the box

I wonder why this perennial problem with its attendant inconveniences to the motoring public has not been given serious thought over the years by the assembly, and more especially the MTTD of the Police Service.

They need to leave the comfort of the colonial way of managing traffic (go/come) such as in the above scenario and think outside the box to alleviate this preventable and human-induced inconveniences caused on such occasions.

They need to consider all the mix in modern traffic management including but not limited to:

- conferring with the ABUGISS authorities to allow for the exhaustion of all available spaces within ABUGISS campus - admittedly, have not had the privilege of entering the campus but my information is, they have a vast land on both campuses.

- ⁠making maximum use of the shoulders of the road by ensuring that all vehicles accessing the campus queue on the shoulders, thus freeing the main stretch for the free flow of traffic.

- ⁠employing the drop off strategy where vehicles drop students and immediately exit the facility to park elsewhere enabling others ferrying students access therein.

- ⁠finding alternative parking spaces/lots off the road/campus to accommodate the teeming number of vehicles which otherwise would have been stranded on the road

- ⁠Employing the queuing theory where applicable/practicable.

Axiomatically, the current situation must not be allowed to persist.

Those charged same (Assembly - Akuapem South or whatsoever, MTTD of Police Service, National Security) must wake up if they are in deep slumber - we live in a country where we do not value time leaving everything to chance.

We need not wait till something nasty occasion, if it has not already, before we put our acts together.

I respectfully rest my fractured peace.

Effiduasi- Ashanti
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