Drive down the Accra-Kumasi or Accra-Aflao highway at 7:30pm, right where the open trunk road begins to swallow a peri-urban settlement. Your headlights sweep across dark tar.
There is no reflective aluminium sign warning you that the speed limit just dropped from ninety to fifty kilometres per hour. There is no painted white line on the asphalt. What waits for you in the gloom, bolted to a high pole above the carriageway, is a solar-powered radar camera ready to bill your mobile money wallet within seconds.
Nobody who drives on Ghana’s roads with a clear conscience will argue against automated traffic enforcement. The carnage on our highways and the informal roadside settlements that have compromised human policing for decades all make a strong case for Traffitech-GH. Taking a compromised officer’s discretion out of the loop and replacing it with objective sensors is a necessary intervention.
Yet even the best technology becomes predatory when bolted onto a broken foundation.
Automated spot fines under the Road Traffic Regulations, 2026 (L.I. 2519) are now in full force across the country, having gone live on Sunday, 1 November. Almost immediately, a bizarre debate broke out online. In their rush to defend the rollout, several well-meaning citizens argued that drivers do not actually need physical speed signs on our roads.
They are merely echoing officialdom. Right on the eve of the enforcement rollout, an Assistant Commissioner of Police at the MTTD went on air to declare that motorists ‘do not only wait for the sign indicating a 50-kilometre-per-hour speed limit.’ Drivers, he claimed, should simply see people along the roadside and know they are in a built-up area. And if you are still unsure, the online apologists say, just glance at Waze or your car’s digital dashboard.
A contributor on my timeline, Lily, called this out for what it is: a blind spot of middle-class privilege.
When did owning a modern vehicle with adaptive cruise control, a mounted smartphone, and an active data bundle become a legal requirement for driving safely in Ghana? What happens to the trotro driver in a twenty-year-old manual bus? What about the commercial driver entering Accra from the regions on an unfamiliar corridor?
Consider the schoolchild on foot. That child relies on physical road signs and painted crossings to force approaching vehicles to slow down. Pedestrians do not walk around with machine-assisted navigation.
Extraction Without Engineering
Another contributor, Magnus, put his finger on the deeper institutional disease. The state has always preferred the lazy route of raw law enforcement over the hard work of public engineering.
Once you see the chessboard, the incentives become obvious.
Auditing a highway corridor, planting reflective regulatory signs at every transition zone, and refreshing thermoplastic road markings every few years costs money. It requires disciplined maintenance.
Mounting a high-definition camera on a pole and firing off Electronic Notices of Violation via SMS (GPS-MTTD) and USSD (*220#) is much easier. It generates instant revenue with zero civil engineering effort. Under Traffitech-GH, an unpaid ticket attracts an additional one per cent penalty for every single day of default after fourteen days, and the liability follows the vehicle owner straight into the DVLA database.
Enforcing the citizen’s obligation with digital precision while ignoring the state’s statutory duty to mark the road is no longer road safety. It is revenue collection by ambush.
The Predictable Excuses of Officialdom
Whenever citizens raise this gap, officials and their apologists reach for a familiar playbook of pushbacks. None of them survives serious scrutiny under the very laws they cite.
First comes the stern legalistic lecture: ‘The law is the law, and ignorance of the law is no excuse. Regulation 211 of L.I. 2519 clearly states that school and market zones are 30 km/h, built-up areas are 50 km/h, highways are 90 km/h, and motorways are 100 km/h.’
Read the opening words of Regulation 211 of L.I. 2519 again. It begins: ‘Except as otherwise indicated by the Road Authority…’
That defence mistakes a gazetted booklet at the Assembly Press for a physical carriageway. While Regulation 211 sets a general 50 km/h limit in a built-up area and 90 km/h on a highway outside it, the law on paper does not mark the tar. It cannot tell a driver at night which exact metre of asphalt marks the legal boundary where a 90 km/h trunk road transitions into a 50 km/h ribbon settlement.
Look even closer at Regulation 222(7)-(9) of L.I. 2519 on jumping red lights. The law defines the offence strictly as a vehicle’s tyre crossing the ‘stop line’ at a signalised intersection when the light turns red.
How does an automated camera fairly prosecute a driver for crossing a stop line on an intersection where the white thermoplastic paint faded into bare black tar four years ago? A regulatory sign or road marking is not a favour to cure legal ignorance. It is the mandatory physical notice that brings the law into effect on a specific stretch of road.
Second comes the bureaucratic shrug: ‘The Police MTTD only enforces L.I. 2519; the Ghana Highway Authority and Urban Roads are responsible for the signs and paint. Go and complain to the Ministry of Roads.’
A senior retired military commander who previewed this piece early this morning diagnosed the exact pathology behind that excuse. Our road network, he observed, is partitioned between rival bureaucratic superpowers. On one side sits the Ministry of Roads and Highways, which controls the physical tar through the GHA, Urban Roads, and Feeder Roads. On the other side sit the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of the Interior, which control regulation and enforcement through the NRSA, the DVLA, and the Police MTTD.
One arm of the state sets a physical trap on the asphalt through engineering neglect. The other arm arrives with digital cameras to harvest the trap.
To the citizen receiving an automated fine on their phone, however, the Republic of Ghana is a single legal entity. Under Section 3(l) of the Ghana Highway Authority Act, 1997 (Act 540), the GHA is explicitly mandated to provide and maintain road furniture, road markings, and warning signs on trunk roads. Furthermore, under Sections 15 and 21 of the National Road Safety Authority Act, 2019 (Act 993), the NRSA has full statutory power to inspect road environments and issue binding Compliance Notices when markings and signage fail safety standards.
If the engineering arm of the state has failed its statutory duty under Act 540 and Act 993 to mark a transition zone, the enforcement arm has no moral or legal business setting an electronic ambush in that exact gap.
Third is the alibi of vandalism: ‘Scrap dealers steal the metal signs, errant drivers knock them down, and there is no budget to replace them.’
Pause and measure the gap between that excuse and the physical ledger.
The state found the capital and private-partnership arrangements to procure, mount, power, and maintain solar-backed, high-definition ANPR and radar cameras across the country, complete with armoured poles and back-end servers. Yet that same state suddenly goes broke and helpless when it comes to bolting a sheet of reflective aluminium onto a galvanised pipe fifty metres ahead of that very camera?
If you can protect a ten-thousand-dollar camera from scrap thieves, you can protect a speed sign.
The Tyranny of the Unmarked Mound
On 17 January 1972, Colonel I. K. Acheampong surveyed the self-inflicted chaos of our public administration and remarked that we had become ‘almost like a nation at war without an external enemy.’ Fifty-four years later, that war is waged daily on our carriageways. As my senior military reviewer put it this morning, our roads have become an active volcano and an undeclared pandemic, claiming more Ghanaian lives through neglected infrastructure than any foreign conflict.
Want proof that our road agencies have abandoned the physical carriageway while drawing monthly salaries from the Consolidated Fund? Look down at the asphalt itself. Look at the speed ramps.
Drive across any region in Ghana today, from the N1 and the Eastern Corridor to the trunk roads cutting through the Volta, Ashanti, and Central regions. As peri-urban communities expand along major highways, residents routinely take picks, shovels, mixed concrete, or heaps of laterite onto the highway at night. They erect their own unauthorised speed ramps.
You can sympathise with the desperation of a community that has lost children to speeding vehicles because authorities ignored their petitions for a safe crossing. What you cannot excuse is the state’s complicity in the chaos that follows.
Under Act 540 and Act 993, altering a public highway or erecting an unauthorised obstruction within the road environment is completely illegal. Every single week, regional directors, maintenance engineers, and inspectors from the GHA, the Department of Urban Roads, and the NRSA drive their four-wheel-drive pickups over these exact same crude, unpainted concrete ridges.
They feel the violent jolt in their suspension. They see the deep gouges in the asphalt where ordinary saloon cars and loaded trucks have scraped their sumps, exhaust pipes, and axles.
And they drive right past.
Even where contractors originally built the ramps, time and weather strip away the warning paint and flatten the approach signs. Nobody returns to repaint the zebra stripes. Nobody replaces the rusted triangular warning plate fifty metres ahead.
A motorist driving at dusk at a perfectly legal highway speed suddenly hits an invisible wall of unmarked asphalt. The financial toll on citizens in shattered shock absorbers, burst tyres, cracked oil sumps, and fatal loss-of-control crashes is incalculable.
Fixing the Road Before the Fine
We cannot build a first-world automated enforcement regime under L.I. 2519 on top of a third-world culture of physical neglect. Yes, thermoplastic paint fades under tropical sun and heavy axle loads. Yes, metal signs get knocked down, and growing towns require new traffic-calming measures.
That is precisely why taxpayers fund full-time maintenance directorates at the GHA, Urban Roads, Feeder Roads, and the NRSA. Who is signing off on corridor maintenance audits while sleeping on the job? Why are regional road engineers drawing public salaries every month while communities dig up trunk highways to build unmarked barricades with impunity?
If Traffitech-GH is to command public trust rather than public resentment, the contract between the state and the road user must rest on three operational rules: Sign, Standardise, and Sanction.
First, sign every enforced corridor under a strict ‘No Sign, No Fine’ administrative protocol. Where automated speed or red-light cameras are already issuing binding tickets, the NRSA must immediately exercise its mandate under Act 993 to publish a verifiable compliance audit confirming that every monitored corridor has clear speed-limit signage and freshly painted stop lines. Until a corridor passes that audit, ticketing on that stretch should be suspended, and a timestamped photograph showing missing road furniture should automatically cancel any ticket on the contesting portal.
Second, Standardise traffic calming through a ninety-day national ramp audit. The Ministry of Roads and Highways must instruct the GHA and Urban Roads to clear all illegal, unengineered community barricades across our highways, replacing illegitimate crossing points with standardised, reflective, and properly signed speed tables.
Third, Sanction administrative negligence by tying corridor failures to named public officers. Every trunk and urban road stretch falls under the jurisdiction of a specific regional or municipal maintenance engineer. When an unmarked ramp destroys vehicles or a missing regulatory sign invalidates an enforcement zone, the failure must be traced directly to the desk, and performance appraisal of the officer paid to inspect that corridor.
You cannot cover the entire republic in digital sensors to save lives while leaving the tar beneath our wheels unmarked and lawless. We all want safer, disciplined roads. Before the state points a ten-thousand-dollar camera at the citizen’s number plate, the engineers on the public payroll must pick up their paintbrushes, bolt the signs onto the poles, and light up the road in front of our headlights.