Some 1.25 million people die annually through road accidents. Roughly the same figure as the deaths caused by malaria.

So in effect, you stand the same risk of dying on the road as contracting malaria.

One of many way to tackle death on the road is to make sure vehicles are roadworthy hence the need for issuing roadworthy certificates. And this is the work of the Driver Vehicle and Licensing Authority.

But middle-men known in local parlance as ‘goro boys’ with the help of some unscrupulous DVLA officials are cheating the system through fake certificates. It’s an inside job with outside help.

My investigations begin where the forgery starts – the offices of DVLA. At the Weija branch, the premises, about a football field, is very busy. There is an annoying wait for the drivers stuck in long winding queues to either certify their vehicles or acquire a license.  To find a ‘goro boy’, you have to ask for help. After a search, I settle on one we have decided to call Tiger.

Tiger is about 6 ft tall. In his early thirties. He’s wearing a black long sleeve and tight fitting blue jeans. He has been plying his trade as a ‘goro lord’ for a number of years now assisting drivers to fake from roadworthy stickers to insurance certificates. I arrange a meeting with him via telephone with an appeal to help me get a roadworthy sticker without having my car go through the process. After a brief chat, he agrees to meet me.

To be able to convince Tiger to do the job without any suspicion he is being investigated, I first get two friends to meet him with a red saloon which has no roadworthy sticker. He successfully executes the job by providing a forged sticker. Certain he’s the right man for the job, I meet him at a popularly joint at the lane running in front of the DVLA office Weija.

Tiger is able to get the new electronic roadworthy stickers for vehicles without they going through the mandatory inspection. He claims he’s aided by officials of the DVLA. And that explains why he charges GHc150 cedis - to bribe his way to get the certificate.

As part of the process to acquiring the electronic roadworthy certificate and sticker, a vehicle will have to go through an automated vehicle system to ensure that it is in good shape and safe to ply the roads.  The system verifies if there are no cracks on the windscreen, checks if windscreen is fake or original, checks if the wiper has worn out.

Photo: Electronic sticker

The blades and washer spray, front and rear reflectors, doors and windows are all checked. When former Minister of Transport, Dzifa Attivor, was launching the electronic system, she emphatically stated that the move would ensure that roadworthy stickers were of international standards.

According to her, the system would ensure that only vehicles that had been tested and inspected and proven to be road worthy were issued the roadworthy stickers and documents. But this is not the case. I meet Adade Richard. He drivers a rickety P-Joe at the Odawna lorry park.

He busily dusts off his old vehicles in the hot scorching sun awaiting his next trek. He tells me he’s fully aware of the malfunctioning parts of his car. And that’s why since the introduction of the e-stickers, he always goes through goro boys to do his roadworthy certificates.

Like Adade, many commercial drivers unfortunately prefer to go through the middle men than acquiring electronic roadworthy stickers from approved joints. Teye Mensah is a taxi driver. He tells me the bureaucracy at the DVLA offices is the reason why he prefers the services of goro boys.

The e-roadworthy system was introduced to help the government to address the regulatory failures of the manual roadworthy stickers. Whether the introduction of the new stickers has been able to achieve that goal is another subject of debate. Former Board member of the DVLA Cecil Gabrah argues every vehicle on the roads must be roadworthy.

But, in the DVLA office in Accra, I discover hundreds of brown and white boxes packed on shelves in a store. Each box has the inscription ‘Handle with Care’ printed on one side and the logo of the DVLA on the other. And each of these boxes contains manual roadworthy stickers.

The Controller and Accountant General’s Department supplied the DVLA with 1.5 million pieces based on the request of the authority in November 2013. Robert Cudjoe is Public Relations Officer at Controller.

The DVLA sold one of these stickers for 30 cedis. That means the 1.5 million stickers would cost about 40 million cedis. But, two years after they were supplied, the stickers have still not been used. Only a few boxes have been used. The rest have been packed and now gathering dust.

The manual stickers became useless a few weeks after the introduction of the electronic roadworthy ones. The DVLA says the rate at which the manual stickers were being faked by goro boys was alarming and had to switch to the electronic ones. The Director in charge of Vehicle Inspection and Registration, George Ackom, tells me he’s confident the sophisticated features of the electronic stickers are difficult to reproduce without the database of the DVLA.

Head of public affairs at the Controller and Accountant General’s Department, Robert Cudjoe says since the introduction of the electronic stickers, goro bys have been out of business. 

Back at the Weija DVLA office, Tiger has successfully gotten an electronic roadworthy sticker for me.

I meet him a week after I handed him one hundred and fifty cedis for an e-sticker. He sticks the fake roadworthy barge on my windscreen. It looks original. Interestingly the vehicle registration booklet he adds is stamped with details of DVLA offices at Akim Oda though Tiger operates from Weija. He assures me his work is genuine.

I’m at the office of the Operations Officer of the Accra Central MTTD ASP Sulemana Sulley Jnr. I will check whether Tiger’s claim that the sticker is original is true. But, this sticker did not pass the test after a two dimensional barcode scanner was run over it. It was a fake barcode on a fake certificate.

So I lead a team of police officers to arrest the goro lord and his partners in crime. Tiger struggles with the officials of Accra Central MTTD but he’s handcuffed eventually.

The DVLA argues that it’s almost impossible for individuals to fake the e-stickers without access to their database, but, but the trade still seems attractive to goro boys. ASP Sulley Jnr believes people are duped because they are reluctant to go through the process.

So while Tiger heads to court for forging documents of the DVLA, the question boggling many minds is whether the war against goro boys would be won one day. Former board member of Cecil Gabrah is skeptical.

For now the police are preparing Tiger for court. Perhaps, the DVLA would have to look within itself if the fight can ever be won. For Joy FM’s Hotline documentary, my name is Kwetey Nartey.