The National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) has organized refresher training for 200 commercial drivers in the Upper East Region on techniques of safe driving in a bid to contribute to reducing road crashes in the country.
The training is in line with government’s efforts to equip drivers across the country particularly commercial drivers on road safety measures, knowledge and skills on defensive driving to enable them drive safely to avoid accidents.
The training had technical support from the Drivers and Vehicles Licensing Authority (DVLA) and brought together transport operators and drivers from the O.A Travel and Tours and the Ghana Private Regulatory Transport Union (GPRTU).
The Regional Head of the NRSA Dennis Yeribu, explained the phenomena of road crashes in the country was worrying and attributed much of the cause to inadequate knowledge on safety measures on the road.
He said it was against this background that government had committed resources to train about 13,000 commercial drivers across the country and about 200 commercial drivers from the Upper East Region were benefitting from the training.
The Regional Head stated that the training came at the time statistics on road crashes did not favour the region.
Mr. Yeribu revealed that provisional statistics indicated that from January to September, 2019, the region recorded 184 resulting 49 deaths and 170 injuries.
Out the number of fatalities, 39 were males while 10 were females.
He indicated that motorbikes formed the largest portion of the vehicles involved in the crashes and added that the youth within the ages of 18 to 35 were mostly involved, making the region to loss its energetic human resource base and families losing their breadwinners.
He said each year the region records about 300 crashes and pedestrian knock down forms about 43 percent, adding, “this region is too small to be losing people every week through road crashes.
The Regional Head expressed optimism that the refresher training would equip the drivers with necessary knowledge and techniques to ply the roads safely to avoid crashes particularly as it was approaching the festive season when most of the accidents occur.
Mr. Yeribu stated that the training as well as their usual outreach education further covered schools and tricycle riders in the region to help reduce incidents of crashes.
The Regional Minister, Tangoba Abayage, explained that wellbeing of the country’s human capital was very essential to achieving accelerated sustainable national development and was the vision of the President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to reduce incidence of road crashes.
Story filed by Emmanuel Akayeti
