''COFFINS'' ON OUR ROADS

“COFFINS” ON OUR ROADS

July has negotiated a sharp curve and very soon will get to its destination and I am yet to see the statistics from the MTTU of the Ghana Police Service, the National Road Safety Commission (NRSC) and the appropriate quarters on accidents on our roads recorded, the number of vehicles involved, the number of deaths recorded and number of injured people for the first half of the year. I am waiting for that year when these agencies would come out with statistics on how many “coffins” they have taken off our streets, how many “3 feet and 6 feet” they have covered on our streets and how many contractors have been to pay for their shoddy road constructions.

I was on my way home (Kasoa) from Dansoman after work, the road from Dansoman Last Stop to the Roundabout is nothing to write home about. There are serious pot holes which I will them “3 feet”, they death traps can cause road accidents and break down of vehicles frequently. As if that is not enough, in this period of rains, these “3 feet” collect water thereby becoming the breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Inhabitants of Dansoman and its environs are at the mercy of these unmerciful, wicked, blood thirsty mosquitoes. The resultant effects I need not mention. I hope and believe someone is watching and listening.

In spite of the bumpy nature of the Dansoman (a suburb of Accra) road which can cause a pregnant woman to deliver before her time, we managed to cross the Dansoman stretch of the road and join the Sakaman road. As we continued our journey I watched the kind of passenger vehicles on our roads and I was amazed, we have ambulances converted into passenger vehicles, whiles our hospitals cry for ambulances. Another bizarre sight is that cargo buses also converted into passenger buses. The worst of it all is the nature of these vehicles, very over aged with rusty metals, weak doors, no ignition so drivers start these vehicles with wires under the steering wheel, no screen wipers, broken screens, no side and rear mirrors, seats thorn with rusty metals exposed which can cause tetanus and the description can go on and on and on.

I believe many city dwellers who patronize the services of these passenger vehicles to go about their daily activities can testify to these descriptions. These vehicles which are some kind of “coffins” in disguise, coffins-because they are used to bury dead people but in this case these “coffin vehicles” carry passengers to their graves.

To my amazement, some few meters to the toll booth, on the right side of the road, there was a Benz bus mangled as if it has been to a smelter but apparently it was from an accident in which 33 of the passengers lost their lives, from information gathered from passengers in my vehicle. One “coffin” has been able to take 33 lives in a single day within some few seconds. And every now and then you will see a number of vehicles involved in accident on the sides of the road and remain there for weeks and months with their resultant horror effects.

The question I ask myself every now and then is; “who is/are responsible for maintaining some sanity on our roads?” but I realize that every user of the road: passengers, drivers and their conductors, pedestrians, hawkers, the police, the GPRTU, road contractors, the transport ministry, policy makers and so on. However, the worst culprits are the passengers in the sense that they don’t examine the vehicles they board to and from work because they are always in a hurry to go nowhere and even when they vehicles are full to capacity they force themselves inside to use any available space thereby putting pressure on these vehicles which are already over aged, lack maintenance etc. The men in black on our roads, the least I say about them the better. The men behind the steer, sometimes one would want to know what demon possesses them, get so drunk and sometimes forget they are driving human beings. Some also quarrels with passengers as if that is all what their lives depend upon and even go to the extent of parking their vehicles to fight with some frustrated passengers.

However, all hope is not lost yet, it behooves on all well meaning Ghanaians to get their hands to the wheels to get it running and where oiling has to be done to make running of the wheels more easily. We should not sit and put our two hands into our thighs and expect that what we must do gets done because that would never happen under this sun.