The Ghanaian Journal

Yesterday’s lead story of the state-owned Ghanaian Times headlined, “Exhaust fumes at traffic jams POLICEMEN IN DANGER”, was quite nerve-shattering.

According to the publication, high volumes of fumes and emissions from the exhaust pipes of vehicles in long traffic jams in the country pose a serious health hazard to policemen who direct traffic.

It continued that as a result, most of them were ‘dying slowly” as they had developed lung, chest and other respiratory diseases from the emissions they inhale.

The claims were said to have been made by D J Avorga, Assistant Commissioner of Police in-charge of the Motor Traffic and Transport Unit of the Ghana Police Service. He however, did not back his claims with any statistics.

Avorga said that the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority did not have the capacity to test the road worthiness of vehicles brought into the Authority’s premises, hence, the high levels of emissions from them (vehicles) that ply the roads.

News such as this no doubt, draws a lot of public sympathy. With only an estimated police population of about 25,000 to over 22,000,000 people in this country, anything that has the tendency to reduce the number of policemen and women must be seriously checked.

It is the diligence of the personnel of the Ghana Police Service, other security agencies and the general public that has considerably reduced the incidence of armed robbery as well as the illicit drug trade in this dear country of ours.

As a matter of fact, for the past seven years the police have been discharging their core roles of maintaining peace and order, security and protection of life and property; and even as we are all bracing up for another landmark election, their services in ensuring violence-free election are crucially needed.

Without them there will be chaos in society, and that is the more reason why an avoidable occurrence like the emission of fumes should not be allowed to negatively affect their health.

The question is, who are to check the vehicles which emit the fumes? Is it not the same police? What then do we often see happening when personnel from the MTTU are dispatched to check traffic offences on the roads and the streets in our urban centres where the traffic congestions are most rampant?

As The Statesman once intimated in one of its editorial comments this year, the general practice is that whenever police officers stop vehicles on the road, they don’t go near the vehicles to inspect the things they have been mandated to inspect - things like driving licences, advance warning triangles, insurance covers, road worthiness certificates, vehicle documents, fire extinguishers, spare tyres, torch lights, among others.

Having stopped the vehicles they (police) turn their attention elsewhere until the drivers themselves go to them with their licences. Sometimes it’s any other thing that looks like a licence and after opening that thing for just one second or so, the ‘document’ is returned to the driver.

What is put inside it is the reader’s guess.
Day in day out the smoke-belching vehicles keep plying the roads but no one seems to care about it.

If the DVLA does not have the capacity to inspect all the vehicles and stop those that are not road worthy, what stops the police from complementing that role responsibility? Do they need logistics to impound all the smoky vehicles in the system?

The fact is that the emissions do not pose a health hazard to only policemen and women who might be controlling traffic.

It does so to drivers, their mates and commuters/passengers whose vehicles might be following the rolling chimneys as well.

Fumes emitted into the air pollute the environment and poses the same hazard to the people’s health.

We are therefore appealing to the police to ensure that vehicles that fall into this category are cleared from the system, otherwise everybody risks ‘dying slowly.’