Mr. Paul Quaye, the Inspector General of Police, on Monday said the current spate of road accidents in could be linked to inherent limitations of continuous training and capacity building of the driving public.
He said continuous training would help eliminate the numerous road accidents resulting largely from human errors and save the government, individuals, and families from agonies including loss of lives, huge costs of treatment of the injured, organizing funerals and managing orphans and widows.
Mr Quaye, at the launch of the first batch in the three series of strategic trainings on effective defensive driving strategies for drivers and officers of the Volta River Authority (VRA) in Accra, said for the past eight years, Ghana had been going through harrowing experiences of road accidents in almost all the regions.
He said reports of a comprehensive study conducted by the research and planning department of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) two years ago on road safety, found out that human error was the major cause, representing 60 percent of all accidents and also a contributing factor in over 90 percent of all accident cases.
"In contrast, only 24 percent were due solely to mechanical faults and 4.8 percent by environmental factors," he said.
The three-day training would cover topics including the roles and responsibilities of a professional driver, ethics, integrity and discipline for drivers, defensive driving skills, the Ghana Highway Code, Road signs and road usage regulations.
Participants would also be educated on disaster, hazards and emergency control procedures, fire fighting and first aid management, human and interpersonal relations, road safety and security management principles and practices as well as eye screening.
The IGP said hardly would a day pass by without a report of an accident occurring in one place or another, causing lots of damages to properties, loss of lives, mental agony and psychological traumas, shock to families, friends and the public as a whole, leading to decrease in production.
He said people driving down a highway were sometimes bombarded with a study flow of thoughts and visual inputs such as the road itself, other vehicles, pedestrians, signboards and the passing scenery.
He said "if these were coupled with other information sources such as listening to a radio, talking on a cell phone, carrying on a conversation with another passenger and further complications by internal imputes like remembering directions or planning what meals to take, then road accidents may be the end result".
Mr. Quaye said training, which was considered as a systematic means of changing the behaviour, knowledge and motivation of people to help improve the gap between the behaviours and achievement of goals, was the key answer to the quest to overcome the identified human errors and mistakes that contributed towards road accident in the country.
He commended the Ministry of Transport and Transworld Consulting and Research Services Limited, organizers and the VRA, for the training programme, and called for a replication in other needy institutions and organizations, saying the GPS would provide every support to ensure a changed situation on the accident records in the country.
Ms. Dzifa Aku Attivor, Deputy Minister of Transport, said a well-developed safety base was one of the greatest assets of a nation which must be nurtured and developed to meet national aspirations, therefore the Ministry would continue to provide the necessary legal and logistic framework to support both the National Road Safety Commission (NRSC) and the Driver Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) to curb the carnage on the roads.
She said the positive contributions of road transport in Ghana's strive for accelerated development and in poverty reduction had faced tremendous challenges due to the numerous road accidents and their effects on victims, the society and the economy in general.
Ms Attivor said recent statistics indicated that over 500 lives had been lost through road accidents and another 2000 with injuries in the first quarter of the year 2009; culminating in the estimation that road crashes cost the nation six percent of its Dross Domestic Product (GDP) annually.
She said the Ministry of Transport in collaboration with some of its Road Transport Service Agencies had designed a comprehensive blue print known as "The Road Safety Strategy II (2006 to 2010) Action Plan," aimed at minimizing and ultimately curbing the carnage on the roads.
Ms Attivor further sated that the Ministry was also engaged in discussions with the Executives of private transport unions like the Ghana Private Road Transport Union, the Progressive Transport Owners Association, the Ghana Road Transport Coordinating Council and others, to explore the possibility of putting in place insurance schemes for drivers as a means of ensuring a secured future for the drivers.
The Deputy Minister said the driver remained a vital agent in the socio-economic development of especially developing countries like Ghana; therefore their welfare and career development should be considered a prime factor in all policies and programmes and called for collaborative effort from all stakeholders to improve upon the road safety situation in the country.