Attorney-General Is Offside on Traffic Violations Order

It is a delicate balance but, perhaps, what Attorney-General Godfred Yeboah-Dame ought to be addressing on the question of what kinds of traffic violations members of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) must be studiously focused on more strictly than anything else, is the establishment of safe and appropriate storage facilities where legitimately impounded or confiscated automobiles involved in serious traffic violations could be safely kept, so as not to become a fiscal liability for the government. At least, that is what this writer understands Mr. Yeboah-Dame’s widely publicized memorandum to the top brass of the Ghana Police Service to be referring to (See “ ‘Stop Impounding Cars that Cross Red Lights without Valid Insurance [Documents]’ – AG Tells IGP” Ghanaweb.com 4/1/24).

I read the afore-referenced news report with great concern because the high spate of deadly traffic accidents in the country, in general, has been due largely to lax policing and the reckless disregard for the “Rules of the Road,” in the main, the crossing of redlights and the routine disregard for traffic signage, often by motorists who may be Under the Influence of Drugs and/or Alcohol. Consequently, advising traffic police personnel to ignore “such minor traffic infractions” as the crossing of redlights, may actually be negatively encouraging the reckless disregard for law and order, and in this particular context or instance, the “legal” encouragement or an inadvisable boost to the endangerment of human and even animal lives. For whoever said that animals were also not human beings created by Divine Providence?

In other words, what Attorney-General and Minister of Justice Yeboah-Dame ought to be confronting head-on here are the primary causes of redlight crossing violations by motorists and not merely the rampantly riotous crossing of redlight signals per se. You see, any drunken driver or motorist who crosses a redlight or ignores traffic signage is not merely guilty of a “minor traffic violation,” s/he may actually end up causing an avoidable accident that could be worth far more than the kinds of judgment-debt liabilities that Mr. Yeboah-Dame is talking about.

But what needs to be emphatically highlighted or underscored here, more than anything else, is the fact that efficient and socially responsible and civically conscientious policing could actually become a major source of revenue for the Government and Ghanaian taxpayers and the citizenry at large, as it is routinely the case right here in the United States of America and most of the industrially and technologically advanced countries, both West and East, as well as the North and the South. Of course, like everything else, this system may also be susceptible to abuse by either corrupt or meanspirited traffic-enforcement agents or personnel. I suppose that was what the Attorney-General was referring to in his afore-referenced memorandum to the top brass membership of the Ghana Police Service.

Ultimately, some form of practicable balance ought to be struck somewhere by the installation of cameras at accident-prone traffic intersections to capture the photographs and the license plates of reckless redlight-crossing motorists and deposited into a centralized data-bank system in most of our heavily trafficked towns, cities and municipalities. And then tickets could be promptly issued to offending motorists to pay reasonably fixed and variable sums of punitive fees or damages, depending on the nature or the seriousness of a particular traffic infraction or violation. And then motorists who firmly believe themselves to have been wrongfully ticketed could then proceed to any legitimately designated or constituted traffic court to fight off the charge or charges.

In a watershed General-Election Year, or Season, like this one, one can perfectly understand why Attorney-General Yeboah-Dame would strategically and savvily attempt to significantly reduce the volume of traffic-violation complaints against the Traffic Police and, in effect, significantly reduce the high incidence of disaffection for the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), thus wisely ensuring that a populist and rabblerousing main opposition National Democratic Congress’ leadership and apparatchiks would not make get the chance and/or the pretext to make undue electoral capital out of an otherwise perfectly kosher or publicly protective law-enforcement measure. We all witnessed a striking example of this bizarre and decidedly asinine attempt to score cheap political points in the runup to the 2020 General Election, when the Mahama-led operatives of the National Democratic Congress noetically promised to summarily abolish all roads and highway tolls, if the NDC was granted access and undeserved occupancy to Jubilee House. Almost nobody seemed to be interested in querying how adequate revenue for the maintenance of our roads and highways was going to be generated.

As we all vividly recall, not many critically thinking and progressive-minded Ghanaian citizens, on both sides of the proverbial Ideological Divide, asked such critical questions as: “Where would the Government find an alternative means of generating the necessary funding for the maintenance and the construction of new roads, going forward from hence?” And neither were any equally significant questions vis-à-vis the considerable number of toll-collection clerks who would be joining the teeming ranks of the perennially unemployed posed. That a sizeable percentage of these toll-collection clerks were members of the traditionally marginalized and routinely ignored Disabled Class, did not seem to be of any practical significance to any of these cheap political point-scoring apparatchiks of the Cash-and-Carry faux-socialist ideologues of the National Democratic Congress.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
April 10, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]