GHANA RAILWAY STAGNATED AFTER INDEPENDENCE
Posted on 26 March 2009
[ From an editorial in the Accra Mail -
“While we search for solutions [to the increasing carnage on the country’s roads] this newspaper would like to suggest that government should consider a long term policy of revamping the railway system, which would be used for carting goods.
“The increasing cases of road accidents in this country can partly be attributed to the fact that we depend too much on road transport for everything. Fuel, foodstuff, timber, livestock and indeed every heavy item in this country is transported by road. What’s worse is that our neighbouring countries like Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger all transport their goods on our bad road networks.
“If we had developed our railway system at independence, we wouldn’t be overly dependent on road transport as is the case now. We had the choice to develop rail transport, but successive governments that took over after Dr Kwame Nkrumah chose rather to develop the haulage transport, which encouraged individual ownership against the rail system which ultimately would have been state-controlled. The result is what we have on hand. For
this reason, this newspaper urges the government to consider sourcing multi-lateral donor funding involving Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso to construct a rail system to link those countries to Ghana.”
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