The Ghana Private Road Transport Union (GPRTU) has introduced a mandatory road tow levy for its members to help reduce road crashes, targeting 2.6 million vehicles.
The initiative, which would be implemented by the Road Safety Management Services Limited (RSMSL), would ensure that disabled GPRTU vehicles were towed off the road at an annual fee.
Under the arrangement, taxis would pay an annual fee of GHS 50, whereas mini-buses (trotro) would pay GHS 80. Buses and heavy-duty trucks would pay GHS 300 and GHS 500 respectively.
The GPRTU on Tuesday, August 9, 2022, launched a mobile application (APP) that would capture the details of all drivers and their vehicles and facilitate the operationalisation of the service.
Mr Godfred Abulbire, the General Secretary of GPRTU, told the Ghana News Agency that the Union was targeting 2.6 million vehicles.
He said the tow levy had become necessary in the wake of the increasing rate of road accidents, some of which were as a result of abandoned disabled vehicles on the road.
This latest announcement seems to be a refinement on the Road Toll Levy, which created great controversy a few years back.
It would seem that the GPRTU and RSMSL have gone into some type of private sector led arrangement, by which the union would levy its members so that they would have the safety of having their vehicles towed off the road anytime they were in distress.
The Daily Searchlight believes that this is a great idea, subject, of course, to it being accepted by the generality of the membership of the GPRTU.
We also hope that the two bodies would fine-tune the concept, in order not to create any undue advantages and disadvantages on both sides.
We wish the venture success, particularly because it is now wholly private sector, and has no government involvement.
(This article was first published in the column EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight. The Daily Searchlight appears on the newsstands of Ghana every working day and PDF versions are available for sale online twenty-four hours a day all day throughout the world on www.ghananewsstand.co
