Traffic light components in front of police headquarters in Accra stolen by thieves - Roads Minister tells Parliament
One of the major problems facing the roads sector, especially with malfunctioning traffic lights across the country, is vandalism, the Minister of Roads, Governs Kwame Agbodza has told Parliament.
He said scrap dealers have been vandalising traffic lights and stealing their metal components to sell as scrap.
This is so rampant that even the traffic light in front of the Police headquarters in Accra has had its components stolen by thieves, the minister said.
Speaking when he appeared before a hearing by the Committee on Economy and Development on Wednesday (June 10), Mr Agbodza said there also those who steal the batteries and other parts of kits of solar lamps being piloted on some streets.
Many of them are not working because people deliberately vandalise them and steal the components.
"... the traffic lights not working, it is on many occasions deliberate, where people go and vandalise the chambers. Some people actually vandalise the chambers and take the metal components and sell them as scrap metals, sometimes vehicles drive into them and then run away, and the value of the vehicles are sometimes less than the things they damage and this is widespread and we are appealing to the public to report any such vandalism to us".
"The irony is that even the one in front of the police headquarters was also stolen," Mr Agbodza said.
Mr Agbodza blamed deliberate acts of vandalism as a major reason behind many dysfunctional traffic lights in Ghana.
He said some unpatriotic individuals, motorists and service providers often steal cables, batteries, and damage traffic light installations.
Those act, he said, was the reason why 65 per cent of the 415 traffic signals were not working.
“There are some unpatriotic members of the public who actually remove the metal parts of traffic signals and sell them as scrap metal in the same way they remove the metal gratings we put on drain covers and sell them to people to manufacture iron rods,” he said.
“There are also situations where vehicles run into traffic lights where vehicles lose control and drive straight to destroy the lights or where we house the controls.
“And these are expensive kits and on many of the occasions, we never get to see who the drivers are and then they get away with it and we need to find money to do it,” he said.
The Roads Minister said often service providers, who had not been engaged by the ministry, ran underground cables, intruding into traffic signal chambers because it was convenient for them to do so.
In the process, he said, those service providers, who he stopped short of naming publicly, damaged traffic installations.
“So, the majority of the time, when you see the light not working, it is not because of anything. it is simply because of vandalism,” he said.
He pointed out that there were about 415 traffic signals for about 60,000 kilometres of roads across the country, saying such low presence of traffic signals was a problem.
Worriedly, in spite of majority of the cities and towns in need of traffic lights, only 65 per cent of the existing signals were active, he said.
To curb continued vandalism of traffic signals, Mr Agbodza emphasised the need for service providers to upgrade the standards of traffic lights with better technology.
