Does the Minister of Roads and Highways live in Ghana?

Opinions on Thursday, November 12, 2020

Columnist: Osei Tutu

2020-11-12

The adage that “if our leaders go through what ordinary Ghanaians go through every day, all our problems would be solved” did not hit me hard until I read on the news that the Minister of Roads and Highways, Kwasi Amoako-Atta, had indicated that some toll booths will be closed on our roads.

This, according to the minister, is to facilitate the comfort of road users.

This announcement by the minister comes after he suffered an uncomfortable delay at the Kubease toll booth in the Ashanti region.

The worrying thing here is that this intense vehicular traffic in our toll booths is not something new and this Minister has been in office since 2017. So, does all this mean while the Minister was unaware of the difficulties we go through in our toll booths? ? Or is it the case that he just didn’t care because he wasn’t enduring the pain himself?

Now that he’s been through the pain himself, see how enthusiastically he wants to do something about it.

This highlights why our many problems are often not solved. People who are expected to take the initiative in solving problems do not bear the brunt of the effect of the problem, so they don’t know how much less it feels to do something about it.

Take the nature of our ways. Bad as they are, our leaders don’t feel it because they use the kind of vehicles that can give them the comfort they need.

With our poor healthcare system? When they get sick, they fly off to seek better treatment elsewhere.

In our poor security system? They demand greater security for themselves, etc.

This is the state we find things in in this country and until the citizenry demands that our leaders go through what ordinary Ghanaians go through, our problems will remain unsolved for an uncomfortable period to come.