Ghana Police must do Something about the Traffic Situation in Wa
I have harboured the idea of writing about the traffic situation in Wa for some time but I never got around to doing it. Today something happened on the road that gave me the push to start. It appears only few motorists in Wa know the traffic rules and regulations of Ghana, or care to follow them. I am writing about Wa because that is where I reside and have first hand information about the traffic situation. On the roads of Wa it is everyone for himself and God for us all. There is little orderliness when making maneuvers on the road. You find drivers crisscrossing at junctions, overtaking wrongly, not using turn signals, ignoring traffic lights, cutting in at round-abouts, and violating every traffic rule in the book. Sadly enough I don’t see the Ghana police doing anything about it. These rules are broken right in front of the police station and no action is taken. This attitude emboldens motorists to behave with impunity or not take learning of road safety rules seriously.
This morning, June 4, 2025, I was on my way to drop my children at school. At a junction, I witnessed one of these acts ignorance or impunity in flouting traffic rules. Ghana is a right-hand traffic (or left-hand drive) country. Therefore motorists drive in the right half of the road. Motorists in Wa generally keep to this rule, except in a few case, like when entering a main road from a side road. According to the 1974 edition of the Ghana Highway Code (Instruction 28), motorists moving along must, “Keep to the right, except when you intend to overtake or turn left, or when you have to pass stationery vehicles on the road”. This is a widely flouted rule by motorists in Wa when entering or leaving junctions.
In today’s incident, a motorcycle rider was coming into the main road from a side road, while a car driver was entering the side road from the main road. The car driver tried to enter the side road from his left lane, thus cutting off the motorcycle rider who was in her correct lane. There was a moment of confusion and hesitation. While the motorcycle rider was rightly waiting in her lane for the car driver to enter the side road before she exited, the car driver had blocked her path while wrongly waiting for the motorcycle rider to enter the main road, giving him way to enter the side road. However, at this point, the car was blocking the view of the motorcycle rider from one side of the main road, which made it difficult for her to clearly see and judge the movement of other traffic on the main road. This was surprising, because it is usually the traffic entering the main road that cut into the lane of those entering the side road. It was rather the opposite today. Luckily enough, Wa is a light traffic city, so such an incident, like many others, did not cause any traffic hold up. However, there’s still the potential of causing accidents.
I hope the Ghana Police will sit up and put some sanity into the traffic situation in Wa. There are many avoidable accidents that occur on the roads of Wa. Several relatives of mine and other people known to me have perished through road accidents. According to upper west media, the upper west region recorded 95 and 143 cases of accidents respectively in 2022 and 2023. And those are just the official figures. I hope the Ghana Police Service will do the needful to curb these needless accidents within Wa and its environs.
If you live in Wa, has this been your own experience? If you live in another part of Ghana, what has been your experience with regards to following traffic rules? Share your experiences in the comments section below.
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