Good driver training can break cycle of accidents

A minor incident on the Aburi road a few weeks ago has reminded me to return to a subject I have often commented on, and vowed to continue until like-minded people on the issue pick up sufficient steam to capture the attention of the relevant authorities.

The driver of a big tipper truck moving towards Aburi had hogged the left side of the two-lane road – the side that should normally be reserved for overtaking, and despite honking and other signs of distress from other drivers, it was obvious that this driver was determined to stay in that lane.

When I got to the police barrier at the foot of the Akuapem climb, I reported the driver to the police, who stopped him when he got there. Just as the offending driver was alighting on police instruction, another truck pulled up and a much older driver got down.

He introduced himself as a colleague of the driver I reported and asked why he had been stopped. When the matter was explained to him, the older driver expressed surprise that there was anything like an overtaking lane. Instead, he explained that the left side of the two-lane road was the “commercial lane”, reserved for commercial trucks.

The older man explained proudly that he was a driver with 30 years’ experience, although the answers he gave to some routine questions showed that he had very little understanding of the underlying logic of driving and road usage.

In my casual observation, perhaps nine out of 10 accidents were due to human error, and most of these human errors COULD NOT have been avoided because the drivers don’t know any better.

They do the wrong thing but think it is the right thing because that is how their masters taught them to drive and that is how their masters’ masters also drove.

When a driver is rebuked for bad driving, it is usually the driver’s mate who is quick to jump to the driver’s defence, even though it is impossible for the mate to see the error from his seat at the back or middle of the vehicle.

The whole trouble starts with how future drivers are selected and motivated. As we all know, unless things have changed radically over the last 20 years, drivers are recruited from the ranks of “dropouts”; indeed, boys not doing well at school are often frightened with the spectre of “becoming a driver if you don’t improve”.

I don’t think there is a single person who wishes a life as a driver on a newborn baby. Even drivers don’t wish driving as a career on their children.

Therefore, drivers are a much maligned and unmotivated group, plagued by low self-esteem and frustration, but they remain at the centre of the cycle of accidents, which cannot be broken while we retain the status quo.

It is ironic that we place our lives in the hands of people who are so little regarded in society. And the irony is compounded by paradox in the fact that most drivers get us home safely time after time.

The inescapable conclusion must be that the majority of drivers are neither stupid nor unmotivated. And driving is a very important profession because without it, our national life – economy, culture, social interaction, the whole shebang – would grind to a halt.

What we need to do is to standardise driver training to bring it in line with the accepted practices in most parts of the modern world.

My suggestion below is a contribution to how we could do that.

Drivers’ training. Driver training in Ghana is mostly an informal affair, which consists mostly of a “mate” being apprenticed to a driver over a number of years.

There is very little formal instruction so the mate must observe the master at work. Ironically, the little direct instruction takes place at the end of the day or the week, when both master and mate are tired.

Anyone who has observed or experienced our drivers at work around the Tetteh Quarshie Interchange in Accra would not have any doubts about the quality of driving that is being passed on through observation to the mates.

With time, those mates will become drivers and pass on the same dangerous skills to another generation of mates; the blind leading the blind.

Even among the middle class types learning to drive, it is still a casual business usually arranged with a friend or relative, usually themselves untrained, as the instructor. It is a short cut to nowhere.

There is a tiny but growing number of formal drivers’ training schools, which is a good development, but this sector caters for those who can afford the fees and who, in any case, would be least likely to flout road safety regulations under any training scheme.

Even so, the training methods these schools use fall far short of international standards. After all, these instructors don’t have to instruct to any arduous standards.

The authorities need to devise one standard scheme for training all drivers in the country.

This, we can only do through the testing process. There must be a rigorous training programme for anyone who wants to be a driving instructor.

There must be a uniform test for all prospective driving instructors and there must be periodic tests to ensure that they understand the latest driving situations, new technology, as well as health and safety regulations.

They must also have eye tests every five years. At the moment, I am not convinced that the driving instructors in the country are of the calibre that can transform driving standards in the country.

My common sense solution is this: The government should negotiate for about 20 to 30 driving experts from a country with a good driver training record; I would recommend the UK; to train five instructors each, which would give us 100 to 150 driving instructors’ trainers.

The idea is for these 100 to 150 trainers to train our driving instructors. If each of these 100 trainers can turn out 10 instructors per year, that would give us 1,000 qualified driving instructors at the end of each year and 3,000 at the end of three years.

At that point, the government can begin demanding that all drivers should be trained to international standards.  These qualified instructors should be employed by the Ministry of Transport and be paid from the training fees that would be paid by would-be drivers.

Nobody can be forced to train with a driving school but the driving test should be such that a proper instruction regime would be followed, whether one trains privately or through a school. However, there should be incentives for drivers to want to undergo proper instructions.

This is how: once we have enough instructors in the system, the government must devise a clear benchmark consisting of a set of manoeuvres in urban, rural and motorway driving, as well as a theory examination that tests various driver abilities.

After that, the government must set an example by insisting that all drivers employed by the government, including police drivers, must retrain and pass the new test. After that, the government must advise all commercial drivers to retrain and pass the test as well.

This should be voluntary but drivers who take this advice must be recognised and given a new licence which would entitle them to display a disc on their windscreen.

This means that drivers with the new licence would be clearly seen by the new disc so that the travelling public will have a choice whether they want to travel with a properly trained driver or with one who does not have a proper training.

However, new drivers would have no choice but take the new test. This would be a logical way to break the cycle of road accidents to which we have succumbed in a most fatalistic manner. Yes we can!


The Mirror Diary
Written by Kwasi Gyan-Apenteng
The Mirror/graphic.com.gh/Ghana
Email: [email protected]
kgapenteng.blogspot.com