Roads and highways minister, Kwasi Amoako-Attah has expressed utter disappointment about what he says is the display of selfishness and irresponsibility by some elements in his ministry.
The minister, who has not failed to publicly arrest and rebuke persons who are caught engaging in activities that affect roads in the country yet again was captured in another outburst.
This time, he was upset about the indiscriminate parking on the shoulders of some of the country’s roads by some freight trucks.
According to him, drivers of such trucks usually come with goods from neighbouring countries including Cote D’Ivoire and Burkina Faso where they wouldn’t dare exhibit such behavior but are allowed by authorities to do that in Ghana.
This he says is contributing to the destruction of some of the major roads especially in the capital; Accra.
More concerning the minister says, is the fact that persons in authority at the Ministry of Roads and Highways are overseeing such acts and failing to apprehend and punish the culprits because of their selfish interests.
In a video captured by graphic, Mr. Amoako-Attah said:
“All of us and our government is spending millions and billions of money to fix our roads. We get transporters from other neighbouring countries; coming to pick cargo from your ports and they don’t respect our axle road regime. See all these vehicles here and they park for hours un-end.
“My information is that some of them are now going through the documentation process at the port so they park on the shoulders of the roads for more than 24 hours. They have destroyed the shoulders of our roads and when they come to the roads themselves, because of the unauthorized axle load that they carry, the roads that we spend our hard-earned monies to build, they destroy them.
“And my information is that they cannot do the same in their countries; the French-speaking countries; Burkina Faso, Cote D’Ivoire, and so on, when they get to Paga, they offload part of their cargo before they enter those countries but in our country, we have axle road centers; the road from the port, there’s supposed to be an axle road center there, we have barriers on our roads, we have some of the customs people manning some of our barriers, the police are manning our barriers but they have free access through our corridor. What are we doing to our country? Because of bribery and corruption and we are the same people who called on the president, who called on the government to fix the country,” he said angrily.