I have read with interest the attempt by the Ghana Private Road Transport Union to intensify measures to reduce road traffic accidents in Ghana. According to the National Chairman Alhaji Yaw Manu, the Union will be introducing breathalyzers and reflectors (Graphic.com, August, 19th. 2011). It has also been reported that the Ghana Police Motor Traffic Unit is also introducing similar devices. This is commendable particularly if the two organizations will collaborate with each other to ensure that the exercise succeeds.

The level of vehicular accidents in Ghana is alarming and particularly sad since they are all preventable. Of all the systems that the people of Ghana have to deal with on a daily basis, road transport is the most complex and the most dangerous. Every day thousands of people are killed and injured on our roads. Men, women or children setting out on trips, will never return home, leaving behind shattered families and communities. Thousands of people each year will spend long weeks in hospital after severe crashes and many will never be able to live, work or play as they used to do. This is sad.

According to the World Health Organization, African nations have the world's highest road traffic injury mortality rates. Whiles the average death rate from road accidents in developed nations is around 20.8 per 100,000 population, that of Ghana is 29.9.

In this country, road traffic injuries are a growing public health issue, disproportionately affecting vulnerable groups of road users, including the poor, market women and children. More than half the people killed in traffic crashes are young adults aged between 15 and 44 years – often the breadwinners in a family. Poorer people comprise the majority of casualties because of the mode of transport they use and also are the group that lacks ongoing support in the event of long-term injury. Lower socioeconomic groups have limited access to post-crash emergency health care, unlike their rich countrymen. In addition, the costs of prolonged medical care, the loss of the family bread¬winner, the cost of a funeral, and the loss of income due to disability can push families into poverty. Furthermore, road traffic injuries cost low-income and middle-income countries such as Ghana between 2 and 4 percent of their gross national product – more than the total development aid received by these countries.

But current efforts to address road safety are minimal in comparison to this growing human suffering. Therefore, the effort to introduce means to monitor drunk driving is commendable. It has been reported in researches that enforcing sobriety checkpoints and random breath-testing can lead to reduction in alcohol related crashes of about 20 percent and has been shown to be cost-effective. But in Ghana, more needs to be done.

First and foremost, ideally, the GPRTU should endeavor to ban the sale of alcohol in all lorry parks in the country. This is going to be a herculean task because of the way our transport stations are set up. Most of these stations have chop bars and other restaurants to serve travelers and other customers, and virtually all these restaurants have inner drinking bars. The problem will be how to convince the owners of these bars to close down their only source of income. Testing of drivers at the gates of the lorry stations would have been ideal but how to manage the traffic that will pile up at these gates will be a problem if every driver should be tested. The best solution is to randomly pick who to be tested and where. That is where collaboration with the police will come in. Whiles the GPRTU is figuring out how best to implement this exercise, the highway patrols of the Motor Traffic Unit should be made to start random testing on the high ways. The GPRTU will need to closely monitor the exercise so that the police will not as usual use it as another avenues to extort money from offending drivers and render the whole exercise ineffective.

I should also state that I very much disagree with Alhaji Manu’s statement that because “the people of the Upper West Region, particularly drivers, are predominantly Muslims, they do not drink alcohol (Graphic.com, August, 19th. 2001). This is a typical condescending attitude from an Alhaji to his fellow Muslims that is not necessary if a serious exercise like the prevention of drunk driving and its accompanying road accidents is to be successful. Muslims drink alcohol. In fact, Muslims drink heavily and the GPRTU chairman lost a great opportunity to bring that to the notice of the drivers and admonish them to stop. Who does he think drinks all the Pito and akpeteshie in Wa, Nandom, Navrongo, Tamale in the North and the Zongos, Nima and Mamobe in the south, ghosts? I have lived in Wa in the Upper West Region before working as public health officer for many years. One of the problems I had was getting the men to come back to work after Friday prayers. If I wanted to find most of them, all I needed to do was go to the Pito bars. You don’t need to be a Mallam to know this, they themselves know that we all know they not only drink heavily, the use all sorts of drugs as well.

This brings me to the second point. Alcohol is not the only intoxicant that impairs the senses of drivers to cause accidents. Other hard drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and heroin are even more serious. All these drugs are used rampantly by many Ghanaians. The long distances drivers are heavily involved in their use since these drugs don’t have the weakening and hangover effects associated with alcohol. So the exercise should not be limited to screening for alcohol only but should include driving under the influence of all drugs that impairs man’s ability to function well and should involve all road users both private and commercial. The Ministry of health would be of help here by getting involved in detecting these drugs in drivers. Alternatively, every driver involved in an accident should be tested for alcohol and other drugs and culprits should be given stiffer punishment.

The next risk factor for road accidents is cell phone. The use of cell phones during driving has been found to be even worse than drunk driving. A new study confirms that the reaction time of cell phones users slows dramatically thus increasing the risk of accidents. A study in University of Utah has reported that the reaction times for a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone. It's like instantly aging a large number of drivers. The study found that even hands-free cell phone use distracted drivers. Drivers on cell phones look but don't see, because they're distracted by the conversation. The scientists also found that motorists chatting on a phone are less adept than drunken drivers with blood alcohol levels exceeding 0.08. Our women should take note because that is how bad it can be.

In Ghana where the number of cell phones one owns determines his social status, some drivers own two or three phones. A cousin of mine has different cell phones to receive calls from his wife and his two girlfriends. It is disheartening to see him on high ways with fully loaded buses receiving calls and chatting on his phones. The GPRTU and MTU should institute a ban on the use of cell phones whiles driving because such drivers tend to show deficits in performance. They make more errors in detecting important changes and they take longer to react to any changes. It is still widely held today that since human error is a factor in some 90 percent of road crashes, the leading response should be to persuade road users to adopt “error-free” behaviors.

The next risk factor for vehicular accidents is seat-belt. It looks like that is a strange part in cars in Ghana. I don’t know about other African countries, but Ghana is the only country I have lived where the use of seat-belt is virtually a taboo. When I was discussing the use of seat-belt with my brother who drives Minivan in Ghana, he looked at me as if I was crazy. He told me that if the essence of seat-belt is to anchor the passenger in his seat, then it was not necessary in Ghana. He thinks that the overloaded passengers and the seats in front and behind the passenger is enough to hold them in place. But what about in times of accidents? Research has shown that wearing a seat-belt reduces the rate of fatality among front seat passengers by 40 to 50 percent. In cars, seat-belt can reduce fatalities among rear-seat occupants by 25 to 75 percent. We are talking about human life here.

The last thing I want to draw attention to is our roads. The road sides of our high ways are too bushy and dark. Inadequate visibility due to environmental factors such as overgrown roadsides make it hard to detect vehicles and other road users on most of our roads. What happened to the Ghana Highways employees whose duties were to clear the roadsides? Well, we still have people including foot soldiers who want work to do in Ghana. This will not be a bad avenue for some of them to consider.

Lastly, road safety is no accident. It requires strong political will and concerted, sustained efforts across a range of sectors. The government, as well as other sectors of society should embrace the exercises being implemented by the GPRTU and give them the necessary tools to be effective. For death on our roads is fast becoming a real serious problem. These efforts will only achieve results if they are supported by a genuine refusal to accept road accidents fatalistically and a determination to overcome all-too-frequent indifference and resignation. Road traffic injury prevention and mitigation should be given the same attention and scale of resources that is currently paid to other prominent health issues if increasing human loss and injury on the roads, with their dev¬astating human impact and large economic cost to society, are to be averted. Offender should be given stiffer sentences. I recommend that the police and law courts should stop calling these crashes as “accidents”, a term that can give the impression, probably unintended, of inevitabil¬ity and unpredictability – an event that cannot be managed by the drivers. These are all preventable crashes not accidents. The GPRTU and all transport bodies and organizations should also educate their drivers to respect human being as the most important item in society. That everything both created and invented by man including the cars and the roads are made for the comfort of man. It is disheartening to see drivers over speeding in crowded neighborhoods, market places and towns forcing pedestrians to virtually run across roads. GOOD EFFORT, GPRTU.

Kwame Yeboah gyeboah@harding.edu