The Acting District Chief Executive for Garu in the Upper East Region, Emmanuel Asore Avoka, has expressed worry over the alarming rate of road crashes involving residents of the Garu District and its impact on the people of the area.
According to him, Garu District leads northern Ghana in terms of casualties of road crashes between the year 2018 and early 2021.
“If you look at the history of accidents; especially those that pertains to the Northern sector of this country, Garu District and its environs are the worse hit spanning from 2018 till date. Because history has it that within 2018 and 2021, we have recorded over 100 deaths.” He revealed on A1 Radio’s Daybreak Upper East program.
Giving the breakdown, Mr. Avoka said “In 2018, we recorded about 19 death; in 2019, we recorded about 50 and 20 plus deaths from 3 separate road accidents; and last 2 weeks, we got another accident in Nasia that killed about 13 persons; and just yesterday, the report I got suggests to us that we got about 14 deaths. So a little above a 100 deaths within the period under review; and that put Garu at the lamb light negatively.
The cause of these road crashes, according to the Acting DCE cannot be attributed to poor roads infrastructure, rather he suspects driver-fatigue.
He believes that in order to curb road carnages that result in fatalities and serious injuries, regulatory bodies such as “the National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) will have to do more work in terms of fashioning out laws that will govern the operations of transport operators that load for long distances, for example; Garu to Kumasi and beyond.
Because factors that cause some of these accidents go beyond the nature of our roads. As DCE, I have been to all the scenes of the accidents I mentioned and I can tell you on authority that there was nothing that connects the accidents to the nature of the roads. In all these accidents, the roads are solid, the roads are 1st class and so there is no point mentioning the roads as being a contributory factor to these accidents.”
Mr. Avoka therefore called for “a road map in terms of policy direction and regulations that will have to govern our use of the roads especially by our drivers.”
Source: A1Radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Ghana
