By Bernice Bessey
The National Road Safety Commission (NRSC), Greater Accra Region, in partnership with the National Lottery Authority (NLA), has begun a two-month road safety awareness campaign to educate drivers and commuters on how best to minimise accidents on our roads.
The campaign, which is accompanied by the distribution of 2,000 education materials, was tagged “Observe Safety and Save a Life”. The NRSC begun the two-month long campaign at the Tema Station on Thursday, and would later spread the good news to other lorry terminals in the region, and stated that some of the education materials would be hung at the station to serve as reminders to motorists, commuters and pedestrians.
The NRSC Greater Accra Regional Manager, Daniel H. Wuaku, said the commission was concerned about the alarming carnage on the roads, adding that in 2014, road accidents numbered 20,442, an increase of 18 per cent over 1,416 in 2013.
He said between the year 2000 and 2014, over 27,000 people were killed by road accidents, adding that the majority of the carnage, 42 per cent, occurred in the Greater Accra Region. Mr. Wuaku’s major worry was that 60 per cent of people killed during accidents are pedestrians.
He mentioned the Kaneshie-Mallam, N1, Accra-Achimota, Tema-Accra Motorway and Achimota-AMA SAMA highways as areas where pedestrians are often killed by vehicles. The situation, he described as getting out of hand, and needed a behavourial change to bring sanity on the roads, saying, “this situation must be a concern to all of us.”
He thanked the NLA for partnering the NRSC, and called on corporate Ghana to also join hands with the commission to campaign against road accidents. The Central Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD) Commander, Chief Superintendent Ofusu Ackah, said the police are poised to arrest drivers and pedestrians who do not observe traffic rules and regulations.
He complained that some pedestrians are killed because, instead of using footbridges, they prefer crossing the road indiscriminately. “Sometimes, the pedestrians are knocked down right under the footbridge. Then people would complain to the police that the driver did not stop for pedestrians to cross, meanwhile the law pardons such drivers.”
The Commander said though the year 2015 has just begun, the number of accidents recorded so far is intriguing, because most of the drivers are driving tired, and the current power outages was also contributing to the many accidents.
The Driver Vehicle License Authority (DVLA) Accra Regional Licensing Officer, Noah Tetteh Mante, said the acquisition of driving licenses and vehicle road worthy certificates had been tightened to bring sanity on the road.
He said individuals with an interest to secure driving licenses would go through a bureaucratic process before being issued. He added that all these efforts are to ensure that only qualified drivers are given licenses, and also to make road safety a shared and collective responsibility.