Ghana’s Roads Claimed 1,492 Lives in Six Months. Who Answers for Them?
The National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) has certified 1,492 deaths in six months. Any country that shrugs at that number has already decided what a life on the road is worth.
Ghana’s roads kill about eight people every day, and we have almost stopped reacting.
Between January and June 2026, the National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) certified 1,492 road deaths, roughly 250 a month. The NRSA’s own spokesperson called the figure “very worrying.” Yet it travelled through the news cycle like weather, as a number to be noted and then forgotten. A comparable toll on any other front would have called the nation to emergency meetings. On the road it earns a statement, a reminder about speed limits and a moment of public sympathy.
The pace is not an improvement on last year. NRSA figures show 2,949 people died on Ghana’s roads in 2025, up 18.2 percent on 2024, with crashes up 9.3 percent. This year’s half-year count sits at that same elevated level. Last year was not an exception that has since been fixed.
The morning of 13 August
On Thursday, 13 August, seven vehicles collided on the John Teye–Ofankor corridor in Accra: two heavily loaded tipper trucks, two passenger buses, two private cars and a tricycle. The death toll reached twelve. The NRSA has not confirmed a cause, and it would be irresponsible to invent one. What we can say is what the response looked like afterwards. There were condolences, a reminder of the statutory speed limits (90 km/h on highways, 50 in urban areas, 30 in built-up areas) and a call for vehicles to be roadworthy. All of it is sensible, and none of it is new. We have heard every sentence before, which suggests that hearing it does not change much.
The price of a delayed disbursement
The NRSA’s own account of 2025 is the most uncomfortable part of the story. Its Director-General, Abraham Amaliba, told Citi FM that the Authority could not run its regular “Stay Alive” public education campaigns in 2025 because of funding constraints. The restructuring of the Road Fund meant disbursements could not resume until Parliament approved the change and a governing board was in place. Both steps are now done. By the Authority’s own reasoning, that delay helps explain the rise in crashes and deaths. “Anytime we do the campaigns,” he said, “the numbers drop.”
That claim is the NRSA’s own assessment and has not been independently tested. Even so, the implication should trouble us. The funding of road safety in a country that loses nearly 3,000 people a year to crashes appears to have depended on an administrative restructuring running on time. If that is accurate, then for a significant stretch of 2025 nobody in authority treated road deaths as urgent enough to protect the money that fights them.
Enforcement that lives in statements
The NRSA also points the finger at drivers, citing speeding and general indiscipline. There is truth in that, and every driver who overtakes on a blind bend carries part of the responsibility. But “driver behaviour” is also the most convenient explanation in the book, because it moves the problem out of every office and into millions of individual cars. Behaviour follows incentives.
A driver who knows the licence test is a formality, the inspection can be negotiated and the speed camera is theoretical will behave accordingly. Blaming drivers alone is a way for institutions to avoid discussing themselves.
Who pays
Ghana’s road deaths do not fall evenly. Over the years the people most exposed have been commuters in overloaded buses, passengers on motorbikes, pedestrians crossing roads with no footbridge and tricycle riders sharing lanes with tipper trucks. Not many wealthy families depend on those modes. The economic argument for acting is also large: each death removes a worker, a parent or a breadwinner, and each serious injury becomes a hospital bill that a household may not recover from.
What a serious country would do
It would treat 2,949 deaths in a year as a national emergency. It would ring-fence road safety money so that no restructuring can switch it off. It would publish quarterly enforcement results, not only casualty counts, so that the public can see whether the rules are real. It would test, inspect and license as though lives depended on it, because they do. And it would stop describing preventable deaths as “accidents,” a word that quietly suggests no one was meant to prevent them.
Eight people a day is a number that should interrupt us. If we can read it, nod and carry on, then the question is not only whether our roads are unsafe. It is whether we have grown comfortable enough with the loss to stop demanding better.
By Hannah Agyemang
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