Hardly a month goes by without us hearing tragic news of the crushing to death of a police officer at a roadblock by a “speeding vehicle”. One of the latest incidents, at the time of writing this article, happened in the early hours of Wednesday 2 February.
The deaths of so many young policemen and women at checkpoints are sadly predictable, yet avoidable, and the fact that it seems nothing is done to prevent them is an indictment of an institution that has an agency dedicated to accident prevention – the Motor Transport and Traffic Department (MTTD).
How close the security personnel at checkpoints are to death in the line of duty will be obvious to anybody who travels on our roads in the early hours of any day of the week, as it was to me when I drove very early on the morning of 1 February 2022 from my village, Akome Agate, through Ho and Sogakope to Accra.
I wondered why the policemen and women I encountered appeared oblivious of the screaming dangers to their own lives, and to the lives of passengers and drivers of vehicles passing police checkpoints.
Sadly, as I told my siblings travelling with me: “I now understand why police officers get killed at roadblocks.” The comment came barely 24 hours before the loss of another young officer, whose only fault was to work in an environment created for her by her employer, the Ghana Police Service.
Aboboyaa block
I had encountered essentially the same conditions on another early-morning drive from Accra to Cape Coast about a month earlier.
The following defects were present at the checkpoints I drove through.
The barriers are not well lit and are therefore not visible until you get very close – in fact, too close – to them. This does not give sufficient room to stop a vehicle being driven by someone who did not expect an obstacle to be there to start with. It is no comfort to the grieving loved ones of a deceased officer to say, “Every driver must pay attention to the road when driving, so the driver was at fault. We will prosecute him.”
To add to this danger, there were sometimes barriers, consisting of a single space in the middle of the road, for use by vehicles coming from both directions, and these barriers were only about as wide as a car, with a few inches either side to spare. At one roadblock the space was just wide enough to allow a tricycle to pass through. When the officer only duty realised, about ten seconds after he’d waved me through, that I was not moving, because I could not, he made the gap a bit wider for me.
To make matters even worse, the officers stand too close to these ill-lit barriers in the dark and appear not to care for their personal safety. They may be officers of the law with authority to stop vehicles, but no human being can prevail in a physical conflict with a moving mass of metal being driven under the conditions described above.
Don’t wait for the book
At another checkpoint, the barrier was mounted a few metres down the road from a poorly lit, broken-down lorry which was taking up almost the whole of one side of the lane that night.
I wondered why the policemen had not moved the mobile barrier along to some point before where the vehicle had come to a halt, to help drivers avoid the danger it posed. It left me wondering if road safety was part of the mission of the officers that morning.
It is written somewhere that, “The [MTTD], as part of its responsibilities, conducts research into emerging challenges in the traffic enforcement and road safety sector.”
One starting point to fulfilling this responsibility would be to conduct research urgently into preventing or reducing the needless deaths of the police’s own at roadblocks at night. They should not wait for legal action by the families of deceased officers to compel them to do so. Every employer has the duty to create a safe working environment for their staff, and the Police Service is not exempt from this duty of care.
If they cannot take care of their own, how can they take care of us?
Michael Foli
Captain Michael Yao Foli is a retired pilot and the founder and leader of Back to the Rock Ministries in Accra
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