Could Ghana’s "Tro-Tros" Constitute An Efficient Private-Sector Mass-Transportation System?

I recently spent a day with a dear friend from the Pennsylvanian city of Scranton, visiting some parts of Accra that are usually included in the itineraries of most local tour companies – as places of interest for tourists that are worth visiting. Our day-trip was undertaken exclusively travelling around Accra with the city’s famous tro-tros (mini-buses).

As we made our way around town, I could not help but wonder what insights, if any, into the life endured by ordinary people, on a daily basis, which the presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the December 2008 election, Nana Akufo-Addo, gained, during the presidential election campaign – when he too decided to visit parts of Accra by travelling in some of Accra’s tro-tros.

What first struck me most, as my friend and I travelled around town during our day-trip, was the fact that it took ages to get a tro-tro – because the ones that came by, were invariably full or did not have two free seats available to enable us board them together. A considerable amount of time therefore went by before we got on one whenever we had to change tro-tros to get to different destinations at various stages of our sightseeing trip.

Our starting point was Mendskrom – which is the nearest tro-tro stop from where I live at McCarthy Hill. Clearly, if we were employees of any establishment in Accra, we would have had to venture out of the house roughly a good three hours ahead of time daily – in order to get to work by 8.30 am.

If ordinary people have to put up with such inconvenience daily, then perhaps the question we ought to pose our leaders is: Are they sufficiently aware of the difficulty workers face as they struggle to get to work on time daily – and if they are, what do they propose to do about it: in order to help boost productivity nationwide?

Another of the not inconsiderable number of observations we made during our day-trip, was that virtually every one of the tro-tros we got around in, was a mini-van that had been converted into a bus. It was obvious to my Scranton friend and I that in effect we were travelling in vehicles that were death-traps – and that were we to be involved in a vehicular-collision at any point during our journey, many of the passengers on the tro-tro, including both of us, would most probably be seriously injured.

One could easily imagine the number of passengers who would end up in hospital with broken legs and probably suffer some internal injuries too – because of the fact that the seats of the tro-tros would most certainly become dislodged and crash into some of the passengers: simply because those seats were bolted unto the thin floors of the mini-buses with the flimsiest of bolts and nuts.

Anyone observing the bolts and nuts used to hold their seats in position in any detail, does not need to be a qualified engineer to conclude that those who carry out such conversions do not take into account the structural need to prevent such an occurrence – because those ‘mini-buses’ had not been structurally designed to carry any significant number of seated passengers, other than two front-seat passengers, in the first place.

In a nation with one of the highest vehicular accident rates in the world, would it not make sense to ensure the safety of the travelling public – by passing a law to make it illegal for any vehicle not structurally designed to ferry passengers, to do so? We must certainly never allow converted vans and mini-vans to be registered in our country to carry passengers in 21st century Ghana.

Surely, if Chinese companies have invested in assembly-plants here, some of the many banks and other non-banking financial services sector entities could be persuaded by government, to partner them: to make it possible for the owners of Ghana’s fleet of privately-owned tro-tros, to acquire purpose-built mini-buses on more generous hire-purchase terms, than are currently available – so that a national tro-tro fleet renewal programme could gradually be undertaken in the next four years?

If young tro-tro drivers, imbued with the spirit of enterprise, who are currently employed by comfortably well-off tro-tro owners up and down our country, were helped to acquire their own tro-tros: with funds from a special youth-enterprise fund set up for just such a purpose, would we not help such young men and women to become self-employed micro-entrepreneurs – and help give birth to an enterprise-culture amongst the younger generation of Ghanaians sadly  currently only being ruthlessly exploited by our nation’s many Shylock tro-tro owners?

Clearly, Ghana’s tro-tros have the potential to constitute an efficient nationwide mass-transportation system – operated entirely by the private sector. Consequently, as a nation, we ought to make a conscious effort to help the many entrepreneurs who invest in that sector – as well as encourage young people imbued with a sense of personal initiative, who find employment in that sector of our economy as drivers and “mates” (conductors to the initiated), to become owner-drivers.

Currently, many of such young people are merely exploited for their labour – and are at the mercy of selfish and hard-hearted tro-tro owners: who care more about obtaining their daily sales than the welfare of their employees and the safety of the travelling public who use those rickety and unsafe tro-tros daily plying roads up and down our country.

Perhaps it is time the members of our political class currently in power did some creative thinking: and explored the possibility of creating a new generation of an entrepreneurial-class for the transport sector of Ghana’s economy – by empowering some of the many young people employed in that sector of our nation’s economy to own their own tro-tros: thus helping them improve their standard of living, whiles providing the public who depend on them with purpose-built and safe tro-tros to travel on.