In my article last week on the ramifications of the illegal removal of the Chief Justice, I drew Mr. John Mahama and his government’s attention to two critical national issues that require serious attention.
They are the frightening, deadly and wasteful, but avoidable road accidents that have gripped the country since January 2025. The second is the government’s loss of control over illegal mining, which it promised to stop during the 2024 election.
In fact, the boldness with which illegal miners affiliated to the current are destroying our rivers and forests easily convinces me that powerful members of the government are financing illegal mining.
In last week’s article, I cited illegal mining and the frequent road accidents as more critical for the government to pay attention to than flexing its political muzzles against a legitimate Chief Justice. In this article I will highlight the threat road accidents pose to our economy, in terms of loss of valuable lives ( including children) and loss of people’s investments to road accident. Looking at the carnage on our roads, it is appropriate to describe road accidents as the leading public health threat to Ghana’s economy.
Accident statistics
According to a World Health Organisation Report, 2023 with an average traffic fatality rate of 19.5 deaths per 100,000 people, Africa is the most affected by road crashes, compared to 16 deaths per 100,000 in Southeast Asia, and 6.5 deaths per 100,000 in Europe. In West Africa, Nigeria has the highest rate of road accident fatalities, with a death rate of 52.4 per 100,000 people. According to the Report, looking at the number of fatalities per population, countries like Ghana and Kenya also experience high rates of road crash fatalities.
In Ghana, data released by the National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) in the first quarter of the year affirms my assertion that road accident are the leading public health threat. In the first quarter of 2025 a total of 752 lives were lost to road accidents, up from 609 recorded during the same period in 2024. This marks a staggering 23.5% increase in fatalities.
The main causes of road accidents are the poor condition of the country’s major roads, deliberate human errors (careless driving, wrong pedestrian crossing), wrong parking of long vehicles, wrong overtaking, over speeding, and several faulty vehicles plying our roads without proper road worthy checks. The question, what has been done over the years to address these problems?
In a recent statement, the NRSA disclosed that 4384 people were injured in the roads between January and March 2025, compared to 3,823 over the same period in 2025. This represents a 12.1 percent increase in 2024. I doubt whether the NRSA statistics are accurate, judging from the number of accidents occurring each day.
In other words, NRSA and its staff may not be obtaining all the statistics from some parts of the country. The Accra -Road, Kumasi-Tamale road and the Accra -Cape Coast- Takoradi roads account for more than three-quarters of the deadly accidents each year. The fact that there are increasing accidents in each new year over the previous year’s indicates that current and past governments are not paying attention to a national canker that is destroying lives and property, running into billions of cedis.
Public action
These disturbing statistics have compelled the NRSA to advocate public action to reduce or stop what has become a public health threat. Thus, road accidents have become Ghana’s number one killer disease, which requires serious policy attention, and not the attention being given to trivial issues like trying to sack the Chief Justice.
Road accidents impose a substantial economic burden, encompassing both direct and indirect costs, and affecting individuals, families, and the country. These costs include expenses related to medical treatment, property damage, loss of productivity due to injury or death, and even intangible factors like pain and suffering.
As indicated earlier, road traffic injuries are a major public health concern, with millions of injuries and fatalities occurring annually across the country. The untimely loss of the productive segment of our population should be a source of worry to any government committed to honouring its social contract with its people. Financially, insurance companies are burdened with paying compensations and replacing damaged vehicles that have comprehensive insurance cover.
Citizen journalists and road accidents
At the time of writing this report last Thursday, July 7, 2025, several accidents had been reported by eyewitnesses or citizen journalists at various accident scenes. One of the latest accidents involved an ambulance which was carrying a patient to a hospital. The eyewitness reporter said the ambulance crashed with a vehicle that refused to give way and killed the patient on board.
A key positive contribution of citizen journalists or eyewitness reporters to journalism is instant reporting of accidents on social media to draw public attention. Citizen journalists need to be commended for sharing live reports of accidents across the country. However, they need some guidelines or training on which aspects of accidents to report and which aspects they are to hold from public view.
Citizen journalists or bloggers need to restrain themselves from being the first to share because of the sensitive nature of sharing photos and videos of dead people without precaution. These unregulated sharing constitutes an invasion of privacy and can shock relatives of the deceased people.
Addressing the economic burden
As a matter of urgency our government needs to undertake critical policy interventions as other countries have done, to stop the destruction of lives and properties on our roads. Below are some suggestions.
- Investing in road safety measures, including infrastructure improvements, driver training, and enforcement of traffic laws. These measures can significantly reduce the number of road accidents and their associated costs to individuals, families and the economy.
- Providing better post-crash care and support services can help minimize the long-term impact of injuries and disabilities.
- Developing effective strategies to address risk factors like speeding, drunk driving, and failure to use seatbelts can also contribute to reducing the economic burden of road accidents.
Finally, I wished the recent National Day of Prayer should have focused on praying against road accidents. Some people believe that the carnage on our roads is not merely about human or mechanical errors, but more of spiritual forces that are hungry for human blood. There right or wrong assumptions that spiritual forces are seeking human blood as pacifications for what some politicians did during and after the 2024 elections.
