Give Road Safety Commission teeth to bite

The Executive Director of the Ghana National Association of Passengers, , has recommended that the National Road Safety Commission (NRSC) be endowed with greater authority to reduce Ghana’s traffic deaths.

Speaking on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show Thursday, Freddie Caut-Pinto noted that the impediment to traffic safety in Ghana was a lack of funding which he said was inhibiting the building of adequately safe roads and the performance of regular road maintenance.

John Mortey Addo of the Road Safety Advocacy Consortium, who was also on the show agreed with Freddie’s position regarding the problems surrounding the NRSC’s inability to demand compliance from other agencies.

He said that Ghana’s best hope of seeing the necessary changes implemented lay in the passage of a bill currently being worked on by the Minister of Roads and Highways to be forwarded to Parliament.

When passed, the bill will empower the NRSC to demand funding for projects, an improvement over the current law that limited the organisation to recommending funding.

It would also enable the NRSC to issue mandates to a consortium of eight road safety stakeholder agencies and these agencies would be obliged to carry them out.

Caut-Pinto and Addo believed that an effective, holistic solution to Ghana’s road safety problems will be only be possible solution through a combination of adequate funding and the cooperation of this consortium.

Caut-Pinto further explained that under the bill, a passenger who sees a pothole could report it to the NRSC, which would in turn mandate the Highway Authority fix it.

With a centralized institution delegating all these tasks, he said, it would be easier to report all manner of road-related issues and to rectify them in a timely and effective manner.

Addo added that under the bill, the NRSC would have offices in every district that would cooperate with the district assemblies. This way, problems arising in districts would be addressed locally; it would no longer be necessary to bring these issues all the way to Accra for consideration.