Anny Osabutey writes: An open letter to Roads Minister on motorway traffic situation

Dear Sir,

I hope you are doing well, and the week has started pretty well for you.

I would like to first and foremost commend your office for getting engineers to work on the wobbling bridge on the Tema Motorway. That a death trap waiting to consume many, so it’s good works are underway to fix it.

Unfortunately, the repair works has come with massive scale of inconvenience to motorists who ply the route. I don’t know if your outfit EVER sensitised motorists about the works or even anticipated the maize of traffic that awaited them. It doesn’t however look like any of what I mentioned were done, apart from a newspaper article when you visited the place.

The importance of the motorway, even as rotten as it now stands, cannot be overlooked in our development affairs, so, in an effect to undertake such an exercise, even with no engineering background but Certificates in social science, I would have thought your MEN would have worked out an alternative routes for those who ply the road. Nothing of that sort has been done, leaving commuters frustrated and with no way out of the situation.

Imagine getting to old tollbooth on the motorway by 6:30am and you are still not even half way your destination by 10:40am? How productive can you be at work?

This is unacceptable and not fair to commuters. Using the motorway should never be a crime but that is the situation motorists find themselves.

Why should a simple construction be a setback to commuters who just want to get to work?

We agree maintenance works often affect traffic flow, but measures are put in place to ease the burden on commuters, but that is not the kind of language familiar to us, here in Ghana.

Is it people don’t about such basic engineering practices or, the whole concept is lost on them ?

Dear Sir, I want to believe that we can do better in how we manage traffic flow in such situations. I am not sure the ministry is bereft of engineers who know such basic things, so why this unfortunate?

We appreciate the ongoing works, but we believe better approach is needed to address the traffic situation.

For example, what about police officers directing vehicles in batches, so the others will follow ? It can easily be done and instead of sitting in traffic for 6 hours just to get to work, one can cut that by a mile..

Sadly, all the MPs who live in and around the Motorway enclave don’t even give a toss about the torture, because they don’t even live in the constituencies and don’t know what is happening there.

I have spent close to 5 hours, and still, nowhere near the construction spot, from the ex tollbooth.

We didn’t become an independent state to be this lost on how to handle our affairs.

Yours truly

Anny Osabutey