The paper sheds light on the problem of the growing embracement of penal populism (fines and prison sentences) as a measure for dealing with road trauma in Africa through a case study of Ghana. It argues that the policy of hunting for rogue drivers to make roads safer in the continent is as ineffective as killing mosquitoes one by one to control malaria. The best remedy is to drain the swamps in which they breed. The swamps, in respect of road trauma in Africa, are the ineffective public transportation systems and the focus on constructing more expensive roads, which encourage the importation of more old cars, and a high dependence on privately run, deregulated commercial passenger transport sectors that are structurally embedded in driver exploitation. These factors coupled with police corruption and the traffic congestions induced by private capital-driven land-use patterns are what underlie safety-adverse driving and road transport problems generally in the continent. More fundamentally, the paper argues that the law enforcement-heavy approach to road trauma essentializes African drivers as having a danger-prone driving culture. This generates (in)discipline concerns that act as a red herring by deflecting attention from the structural factors undermining road safety in the continent: the continuing effects of neoliberal programs funded by international development bodies, and the profiteering and political interests of powerful coalitions of private transport owners’ unions and public officials that have molded and entrenched the continent’s road transport sectors in its present problematic forms to serve particular purposes. The paper hopes to move road safety conversations in Africa away from the present thinking that enforcing greater punishments against drivers, rather than addressing the broader societal systems whose effects manifest in the road transport sector, is “the” answer to the unacceptably high rate of carnages on the continent’s roads.

This paper attempts a better explanation for the causes of dangerous driving behaviors among “Tro-Tro”(minibus) drivers in Ghana. The current media, policy, and academic coverage of the problem reveals an immutable discourse that considers the behaviors (such as over speeding) as a function of moral failure, indiscipline, or bad attitudes on the part of the drivers. Often little consideration is given to the context of the behaviors and their influences. This paper provides an alternative explanation that considers the behaviors as predictable actions that are systematically connected to the Tro-Tro industry. Tro-Tro drivers operate within a precarious work climate marked by problems such as low wages; cut-throat competition; high level of job insecurity; imposition of non-negotiable throat-cutting daily fees by car owners and harassments from bribe-demanding corrupt police officers. The exigencies of meeting these numerous financial and other demands of their work,not moral failure, are what fuel dangerous driving behaviors among the drivers. Based on this analysis, the present public policy of using penal populism (i.e., heavy fines and prison sentences) to address road trauma in Ghana is ineffective for inducing safer driving behaviors among Tro-Tro drivers. Interventions to reduce road transport problems involving such commercial passenger vehicles in Ghana and other developing countries similarly situated must be broad, more-wider reaching and include initiatives that also address the range of political-economic causes, motivations, and constraints that incentivize the drivers to drive dangerously. The paper contributes to the sustainable development goals of ensuring safe and sustainable transport (SDG 11.2), and reducing deaths and injuries from road accidents (SDG 3.6).

Governments in Africa are licensing major global ride-hailing firms to launch operations in the continent. This is often presented as a refreshing development for the continent to leverage technology to address its twin problems of inefficient urban transport and rising youth unemployment. Interviews with ride-hailing adopters (drivers, riders, and car owners) and researchers in Ghana suggest, however, that whereas the technology is driving up the standards of road transport experience, the benefits are accessible to a select few (largely, the younger, highly educated and relatively high income-earning class). The lopsided power relations underlying the ride-hailing industry have also meant that the economic opportunities it avails disproportionately benefit a few powerful players (e.g. ride-hailing firms and car owners) while stimulating‘turf wars’among online and traditional taxi drivers; deepening existing gender inequalities in access to income-earning opportunities in the commercial passenger transport sector; encouraging unhealthy driving practices, shifts from shared public transport, and inundation of the roads with more private cars. While it will be imprecise to say that the private gains of ride-hailing outstrip the public costs and, therefore, the technology is detrimental to Ghana’s development, the considered evidence raises the need for sustained scrutiny of the hailing of technological interventions as though they are the magic bullets for socio-economic transformation in Africa. Overall, the paper argues that dismantling the power structures underlying Africa’s urban challenges will require more than splashing‘smart’apps and other tech wizardries around. Indeed, the lessons from Ghana’s ride-hailing industry suggest that such exclusively technical solutions could easily take root and pattern after existing strictures of unjust power structures in ways that could exacerbate the social and environmental problems they are supposed to address.

African countries serve as used vehicle dumping sites for advanced capitalist countries, undermining global and local goals to move toward safe and low-emissions transport. Africa’s used vehicle dependency is commonly explained in terms of push-pull factors linked to demand for new cars and stringent environmental policies in wealthier countries that make available used vehicles for export, the limited purchasing power for less-polluting new safer vehicles, and weak regulation of vehicle emissions in Africa, all of which sustain used vehicle import on the continent. Drawing on the Ghanaian case, we present an enhanced explanation that brings in the role of historical underinvestment in public transport and larger processes that channel public resources toward car-oriented transport and land use, marginalizing other modes of transport used by the majority. Using historically informed political economy analyses and drawing on interviews and grey literature including media and institutional sources, this paper makes two contributions. First, it advances used vehicle research by moving beyond the push-pull approach to incorporate the historical institutional drivers of used vehicle and automobile consumption generally in Africa. Second, it provides insight into why used vehicle import bans on their own are unlikely to lead to sustained environmental and public health benefits and instead recommends more holistic policies for shifting toward cleaner, safer and affordable public transport in Africa. Transport and land-use planning reforms and investment prioritizing public transit including minibus recapitalization programs, as well as mixed land use and transit-oriented development can help reduce used vehicle dependency and the harms it brings.