EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight of Monday, 8th August,, 2022
Six persons were confirmed dead on Wednesday morning following an accident which occurred at Abuakwa in the Ashanti Region.
The accident, which involved a Ford bus with registration number GS 3600-12, with passengers on board, was heading towards Kumasi from the Sunyani highway.
The bus was said to have failed breaks and crashed into a bus of the Martyrs of Uganda Preparatory School, which was in the direction of Abuakwa to pick up school pupils.
A source at the Abuakwa Police Station told the Ghana News Agency that the school bus was thankfully empty at the time of the incident.
Two passengers in the Ford bus, including the conductor, died on the spot.
According to the Police, scores of other injured passengers were rushed to the Abuakwa Polyclinic where four of them died on arrival.
The source said the remaining are receiving treatment while the remains of the dead had been deposited at the morgue for autopsy.
Police had since commenced investigations into the incident
The Daily Searchlight continues to mourn the needless tide of deaths and blood on Ghana’s highways. It seems that our remonstrations with drivers to avoid speed, and to only get on the road with worthy vehicles, continue to hit dead ears.
We believe that drivers, vehicle owners and transporters concentrate on profits, to the exclusion of all else, including safety of the very drivers and their passengers.
We continue to be confounded about how and why transport companies, which continue to experience major losses from vehicular accidents, continue to fail to insist on the standards that will keep their drivers and vehicles safe.
We continue to fail to understand, if the human and vehicular loss was affecting the insurance companies, why they fail to insist that drivers deploy the appropriate standards.
We must together insist that these entities put the safety of passengers first above all considerations.
(This article was first published in the column EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight of Monday, 8th August,, 2022. The Daily Searchlight appears on the newsstands of Ghana every working day and PDF versions are available for sale online twenty-four hours a day all day throughout the world on www.ghananewsstand.com).
