The Deputy Director in charge of Research, Monitoring and Evaluation at the National Road Safety Commission [NRSC], Rudolf Beckley has called on Parliament to expedite work on the review of the Commission’s mandate which has been in the works for the past 6 years. The review of the NRSC’s mandate according to Mr. Beckley has become even more necessary now if the Commission is to achieve its objective of halting levels of fatalities by 2015 and achieving a 50 percent reduction in fatalities by 2020. Speaking on Multi TV’s current affairs programme PM EXPRESS, Mr. Beckley noted that even though the Commission has set these objectives, the Commission “cannot do that alone [and] that is why by virtue of our mandate we’re a coordinating body”. He expressed concern that even as a coordinating body, the NRSC’s mandate “does not even allow us to demand compliance from our stakeholders” hence the Commission’s stakeholders do not commit themselves to the action plan designed to improve road safety and “they blame it on all kinds of excuses. ...we now want to have an authority status where we can have the powers to demand compliance from our stakeholders”. Drawing an analogy between the Commission’s work and that of the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], Mr. Beckley stressed the need for the Commission to have enough powers to at least make it be able to sanction defaulters. “We need powers that can make us sanction like the EPA” he said. “The EPA is under a Ministerial authority but then they have the powers to even sanction the Ministry. We want to assume such powers because don’t forget that we have a mandate to reduce the carnage [on the roads]. We cannot have that volume of mandate if we do not have the powers to back to [it] so our contention is that once we’re given the mandate to demand compliance from all our stakeholders then you [will] see the carnage reduce”. “A typical example is in the engineer area where we have identified hazardous sections in the road network and they are not attended to, we can sanction the stakeholders to attend to them. Where we have identified a vehicle defect in the road transport system and we realise that it is a particular entity that is supposed to ensure that vehicles that are using the road are truly road worthy and they are not, we can demand compliance from that entity” he noted. According to Mr. Beckley, even though the new road safety regulation “makes it clear that to for you to operate a public transport vehicle you need to belong to a recognised association or union” most commercial drivers are not adhering to the regulation but said the Commission is going to make sure that commercial drivers adhere to the regulation. “Why are we clamouring for that, so that when it comes to issues of training, issues of driver upgrading, competency, skills and all that we can identify the driver and we can identify them through the transport unions and therefore when you’re demanding compliance we demand compliance through the respective transport organizations and the unions that have been identified but if you are a an individual person operating in the road transport system, how do we identify you? Like these floating drivers, how do we identify them? That is what our new regulation which is before parliament is seeking to do” he added. Mr. Beckley noted that despite efforts aimed at reducing the carnage on the roads, road crashed have increased by 3.1 percent but the resultant deaths have reduced by 5.1 percent. Road crashes in the country have been on the high with three separate crashes recorded within the first two weeks of January 2011 in the Ashanti, Eastern and Northern regions leading to the deaths of some 20 people. Nii Akrofi Smart-Abbey/Multi TV/Ghana