Why Africa cannot prosecute (or even educate) its way out of road accidents: insights from Ghana

This paper examines the rising embrace of penal populism—greater fines, prosecutions, and incarceration—as a primary response to road trauma in Africa, using Ghana as a case study. It argues that targeting individual “rogue” drivers is akin to killing mosquitoes one by one to control malaria; instead, the underlying "swamps"—structural conditions such as underinvestment in public transport, the prioritization of new road construction that stimulates importation of old vehicles, dependence on deregulated private commercial passenger transport characterized by exploitative labor relations, police corruption, and congestion driven by private-capital-oriented land-use patterns—must be addressed. The paper contends that enforcement-heavy approaches essentialize a danger-prone driving culture and deflect attention from the political–economic forces shaping unsafe outcomes: neoliberal reforms promoted by international institutions and the interests of powerful coalitions of transport owners and public officials. It calls for shifting Africa’s road safety discourse from punitive enforcement and narrow education to systemic reforms targeting the broader societal systems producing unsafe behavior and outcomes.

Festival Godwin Boateng