General News of Wednesday, 21 February 2018
Source: www.ghanaweb.com
2018-02-21
Professor Ernest Aryeetey
The former Vice Chancellor Prof. Ernest Aryeetey has indicated that the University of Ghana’s decision to collect road tolls was to help reduce traffic congestion leading to the campus and most importantly to generate a steady income stream for the maintenance of roads and other infrastructure into the future.
Prof Aryeetey expounded that commuters, who had got nothing to do with the university, had “over used” the roads hence the implementation of the road toll as a deterrence.
“The motivation was to solve problems. The problem was that there was over crowding of the roads…there was a problem because the roads had become over used by traffic that had got nothing to do with the [university] roads.” He told Kwabena Kyenkyenhene Boateng, host of ‘21 Minutes with KKB’.
Queried if it was the best way to solve the traffic management problems in the city he swiftly answered, “I think so” adding that although he was aware most people were against the implementation, it was not a personal decision.
According to him, he put up the proposal and solicited the opinions of appropriate persons who jumped on the idea. As then Vice Chancellor, he figured that charging drivers who plied the University’s roads was the best way because no one had come up with a better alternative to resolve gridlocks in Accra.
“I know that there were people who had other views but again it wasn’t just me imposing my will on the people. I put a proposal which was discussed by a large group and accepted.
Of course as Vice Chancellor I should take responsibility but nobody has shown me yet a better way of fixing your roads and controlling the traffic movement,” he averred.
The media-reserved professor further argued that road tolling was nothing new as it has been the normal practice of many “decent” Universities (including the premiere university) especially those in the Western countries where authorities controlled the movements of travelers.
“In almost every decent university that I have seen outside, traffic in and out if the university campus is controlled; whether in Europe or in America or wherever because whenever you have a campus traffic in and out is controlled for many different reasons. It’s only here and in this university, for many many years, traffic inside and out of campus was controlled.
What we were doing was basically controlling something that we had done before and it’s done in all decent universities. That is what we were doing.”
The past Vice Chancellor cited that aside discouraging people who drove through the university, but had no business with it and did not want to, it was also to generate funds that will be used for the maintenance of the roads.