Carnage On The Highways

It is early days yet but we can state without doubt that we have had too many deaths on our highways already.

Someone remarked that road fatality in the country is one of the highest in the world and we wonder when the statistics would be reduced to the barest minimum.

For now traveling, especially by the private transport system, is the most daring risk to take in the country.

Passengers rarely complain when drivers are driving recklessly, especially when overtaking drivers, as though they do not have a tomorrow to care about.

Those who query the drivers for being reckless risk being described with unpalatable words.

As things stand therefore passengers just keep praying for safe arrival at their destinations, their hearts in their mouths as the drivers cruise along and overtake at will.

A few days ago, a former MP died in a gory accident, the circumstances of the death presenting us with one of the major causes of road fatalities on the highways.

The former MP for Akwatia died in an accident caused by a broken down truck left on the road, his vehicle unknowingly driving into it. This factor has claimed countless lives on our highways. It is reason towing or recovery trucks were acquired for a special unit created to clear the highways of broken down vehicles but like other public ventures, little is being felt of their activities. We must be serious in this country.

We wish to ask what has happened to the towing trucks imported for the purpose?

Those who see us as not being serious as a people would not totally be wrong considering the way we manage our affairs. Why must we allow people to die when their lives could have been saved under the circumstances? Imagining the effects of the death of the former MP on his immediate family and the country as a whole, is painful.

Someone in officialdom, perhaps a politician, withheld the necessary support the safety service required to discharge its work beyond importing the towing vehicles.

Even more worrying is the fact that nobody would care about finding out how to ensure that a future recurrence is not recorded.

Many more trucks would continue to break down and left to pose danger to other road users. We never learn in this country and this is causing us lives.

A national discourse must be undertaken so we can find a way out of the needless deaths of people on our highways.

We wish the death of the MP, through the non-removal of a broken down vehicle on a highway, would be the last time we would hear this. But can we vouch for that?

Not when public officials refuse to discharge their duties with the needed commitment and those who ply the highways do so with little or no regard for human lives.

Even law enforcement officers assigned the very important duty of ensuring that safety regulations are adhered to do not do so with the needed commitment and resoluteness.

We cannot continue to spill blood on the highways when with total commitment from all of us we can as stakeholders come together to fashion out ways to stop the bedlam and carnage.