Madness on our roads
Last Saturday I was taken hostage by drivers who have no regard for road safety on the Dawa-Dawhenya section of the Aflao Road, with the worst portion between the old Customs checkpoint and Prampram Junction, in a free-for-all movement without regard to the safety of drivers who had the right of way.
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The worst part was when a pickup truck with the insignia of the National Road Safety Commission, with registration number GN 9310-11, joined the madness.
At a point one could not tell those in their proper lane as against the lawless lot. Indeed, vehicles from Dawa towards Dawhenya spread out in as many lanes as the drivers decided to create, completely blocking those from Dawhenya towards Dawa that I had to make a distress call to the Director General of the Motor Traffic Department of the Ghana Police Service, ACP A. Awuni.
I was more than convinced that if the police did not get there in time, there could be an accident, which undoubtedly is needless and avoidable. More importantly, I have seen what the presence of a single policeman can do in maintaining order among drivers if the police decide to be of assistance to the public.
At least I can recollect the influence of one policeman on the Labadi-Teshie Road, in the days that the two lanes terminated before the Military Academy and Training School.
That lone policeman brought so much order on the road that drivers, long before they crossed the Kpeshie Bridge, began to ask whether Corporal Addai was on duty.
One single policeman worked so diligently that he did the service good and earned for it an enviable reputation. No wonder the IGP at the time, Mr Peter Nanfuri, appreciated the selfless service as Corporal Addai was not only promoted but went on peace-keeping duties outside the country.
Until lately, driving from Buduburam to Kasoa was hellish for drivers on weekends, before the police decided to act.
Now police personnel are posted to a number of intersections along the road. The result is that no matter the volume of traffic, there is consistent flow and those in front will move ahead of those behind them. That is exactly what the police would have to do to bring sanity on the Aflao road to ensure that the madness on that portion of the road is cured.
Last Saturday, but for patience and tolerance, an articulated truck driver would have crashed into a bus belonging to the Ghana Armed Forces Southern Command Headquarters, which was driving on the left lane of the road towards Dawhenya from Dawa.
The irony is that if the accident had occurred, the blame would have been heaped on the articulated truck driver who had to sacrifice because of the recklessness of the military driver.
My decision to share the harrowing experience with the wider public stems from the fact that when we were expressing our frustration at a fuel station at Dawhenya, the attendants told us that that was the situation every weekend.
To them, we had not seen anything since we came early in the day. The worst was yet to happen. How can innocent Ghanaians be exposed to such avoidable and needless stress when all it needed was to post police personnel along the road to ensure the smooth flow of traffic?
There were a number of them at the Kpone Junction, and they would have been more productively used if they were not massed up at one point but spread along the road.
For as long as some drivers act irresponsibly and recklessly on our roads, our police personnel must be empowered to take control of safety on our roads. Most often, the reckless drivers escape from fatal accidents and the responsible ones are made to suffer the consequences of the dastardly and bestial conduct of others. But then the police must be clean to enforce the rules.
The situation where some police drivers, for whatever reasons, none related to national security, decide to drive on the wrong side of the road because they are late or for ease of convenience must stop and restricted to genuine emergencies.
Back to the Aflao road; there is no emergency to warrant drivers from Dawa taking over the whole stretch of the road as if it was a multiple lane route on a dual carriageway. The police must act to ensure sanity on the road. As it is often said, ‘prevention is better than cure and a stitch in time saves nine.’ We must not fail to recognise the facts and be awakened by an accident.