Government Must Enact A Law To Protect Passenger Rights

For quit a long time now, the rights of passengers have not been adequately addressed by relevant stakeholders in the transport sector. The daily upsurge in road accidents is a clear manifestation that there is a seer failure in the protection of passenger rights in Ghana.

The Ghanaian passenger is a key stakeholder in the transport industry and in ensuring road safety. Without, the passenger, there is no travel nor will there be road safety regulations. Though there are several laws and regulations governing the transport sector in Ghana, passengers face several problems from the time of buying a ticket to the final destination.

Does the passenger have a role in ensuring a better transport system and road safety? The answer is obvious. The stakeholders in the transport industry such as Government, Road Safety Commission, Security agencies and transport owners have played significant role in promoting safety and sanity in the sector. However, their efforts are shadowed by their own actions and inactions, which is their failure to perform their lawful duties, corruption, or individuals with selfish interest, who turn to exploit the passenger to their advantage.

Passengers face the pressure of buying a ticket, paying exorbitant unapproved fares, exorbitant luggage fare, overloading of vehicles, unnecessary delays during travel, over speeding, reckless driving, among others. Most of the transport owners especially GPRTU use very old and poor conditioned bushes to load passengers. These include Benz Bushes, 207 Benz bushes, Ovan, Taxies, among others which are the most likely ones that a passenger is likely to board when traveling. A passenger boarding any of these bushes is most likely to face one problem or another. The worse of it all are those traveling to rural areas and country sides with limited transport system. Also, PROTOA, STC, VIP, VVIP, MMT, and all other passenger transport operators are victims of passenger rights abuse and cannot be left out.

The most disturbing factor is how drivers and vehicles owners treat passengers: they do not see the passenger as human being that should be treated with respect; passengers are insulted and sometimes dragged off the vehicles if s/he tries to defend his/her rights. Passengers are packed like animals or goods, sitting on bare iron seats or wooden chairs, with little or no space to turn the body, the heat in the bush is more like an oven, the bush itself is rusted and a little contact with the body will result to injury and possibly tetanus. Drivers on the road over-speed without any fear of being busted by police (MTTU), after all One Ghana cedi will free them from any arrest.

The fact and perhaps the disheartening situation that passengers face is that when a passenger report a case to the transport owner, police or other relevant authorities, no action is taken against the culprit. Bribery and corruption seems to dominate, preventing passengers from defending their rights. The DVLA give license to unqualified drivers, police allow poor conditioned passenger bushes to plough on the routs, even passengers over-crowed themselves with the excuse of wanting to go fast.

What is worrying is that about 60-80 percentage of passengers are ignorant of their rights, they do no understand transport regulation, and others complaint of no solid law to directly protect passenger rights. Personally, I have confronted drivers and conductors on several occasions due to disregard and abuse of passengers. I shudder to think that Ghanaian passengers are educated illiterates, so they seldom speak against drivers. In many instances, passengers only speak out during over-speeding and careless driving, but few or no passenger have the courage to get out of the bush, or report the driver to the legal authorities.

Frankly speaking, Ghana is good at initiating policies and laws, but weak in their implementation. The existing rules and legislations governing the transport sector are poorly implemented; not enough effort is made on educating the public, and for that matter the passenger, on road safety regulations. My recent observation and interviews with few passengers and travelers reveals that passengers are not aware of any specific laws protecting their rights. They indicated that about 90% of the laws works in favour of car owners, adding the transport owners, drivers, and road safety enforcers flout the rules with impunity whiles corruption is breeding freely for the mutual gains of both the transport owner and the road safety enforcer. In fact, passengers in Ghana are left to the mercy of their faith during travel.

In order to promote road safety and reduce the cunning incidence of road accidents the government, road safety regulators, transport owners, road users, and passengers need to work together as a stakeholder. Public education must be intensified, the MTTU must undertake their legal duties, transport owners should see the passenger as a valuable asset of which their business can not boom without them, and the passenger must educate him/herself on passenger's rights. Above all, the government should enact a specific law to protect passenger rights and to give them adequate legal protection to take on drivers and car owners whose actions and inactions seems to disrespect or is likely to cause threat to passenger rights in Ghana.

Azebre Abu Ibrahim
(Graduate in Community Dev't, UDS)
[email protected]
0240393109