A fatal multi-vehicle collision on 3 August 2025 near Bunso Junction in Ghana’s Eastern Region has reignited a longstanding institutional question: why has one of West Africa’s most economically critical road corridors remained a single-carriageway highway despite decades of documented fatalities, parliamentary scrutiny, and successive government pledges to rehabilitate it?
The crash, involving a State Transport Company bus, a fuel tanker, a Mitsubishi pick-up, and a Kia Sorento at Etukrom, killed three people. It is not an isolated incident. The Accra-Kumasi Highway has accumulated a grim record of head-on collisions directly attributable to its structural design, a pattern that Kennedy Osei Nyarko, Ranking Member of Parliament’s Roads and Transport Committee, described bluntly on 4 August as producing “a death trap.”
Osei Nyarko’s diagnosis is structural, not incidental. “It is a single-lane road, so if you are not careful when overtaking, you can easily crash into an oncoming vehicle,” he told Eyewitness News. The highway’s single-carriageway configuration leaves virtually no margin for error at the speeds and vehicle densities it routinely carries, and no amount of driver education resolves a geometric constraint baked into the road’s design.
An Economic Artery Governed by Institutional Inertia
The Accra-Kumasi corridor is not merely a domestic road. It functions as a primary freight and passenger spine connecting Ghana’s commercial capital to the Ashanti Region, and onward to the Bono, Ahafo, Bono East, Savannah, North East, Northern, Upper East, and Upper West regions. Goods moving between Accra’s Tema Port and landlocked northern Ghana, as well as transit cargo destined for Burkina Faso and Mali under AfCFTA-aligned trade facilitation arrangements, depend heavily on this corridor’s throughput capacity.
ECOWAS’s regional transport facilitation framework, specifically the Interstate Road Transit (ISRT) scheme, identifies high-capacity inter-urban corridors as foundational infrastructure for intra-regional trade. Ghana’s failure to expand the Accra-Kumasi Highway to a dual carriageway represents a measurable drag on that framework’s effectiveness. Every hour of congestion or road closure following a crash raises logistics costs for traders operating under the AfCFTA’s preferential tariff schedules, eroding the competitiveness gains the agreement is designed to deliver.
Comparative data from the region sharpens the governance gap. Côte d’Ivoire completed the dualization of its Abidjan-Yamoussoukro corridor, a comparable inter-urban artery, over a decade ago, and has since extended dual-carriageway infrastructure toward Bouaké. Senegal’s Dakar-Diamniadio toll expressway, operational since 2013, demonstrates that francophone West African states have moved decisively on trunk road infrastructure, partly driven by the institutional pressure of WAEMU’s convergence criteria, which treat infrastructure investment as a macroeconomic variable. Ghana, operating outside the WAEMU monetary union, faces no equivalent supranational accountability mechanism for road investment.
Partisan Gridlock as a Governance Mechanism Failure
Osei Nyarko’s call to address the highway “devoid of politics or partisanship” points to a specific institutional dysfunction: the tendency of successive Ghanaian governments to treat trunk road rehabilitation as a patronage instrument rather than a public goods delivery obligation. Infrastructure projects on the Accra-Kumasi corridor have repeatedly stalled between administrations, with each incoming government deprioritizing contracts awarded by its predecessor, retendering works, or simply allowing partial constructions to deteriorate.
This pattern is not unique to Ghana. Nigeria’s Lagos-Ibadan Expressway spent over a decade in partial rehabilitation before a structured public-private partnership framework, backed by concessioning arrangements, accelerated completion. The lesson from Lagos-Ibadan is that ring-fencing critical corridor investment within a legally structured, multi-year financing vehicle, insulated from electoral cycles, produces more durable outcomes than annual budget allocations subject to political discretion.
Ghana’s Road Fund, established under the Road Fund Act (Act 536), theoretically provides a dedicated revenue stream for road maintenance through fuel levies. In practice, the Fund has been chronically undercapitalized relative to the maintenance backlog, and disbursements have not kept pace with the rate of road deterioration on high-traffic corridors. A 2023 assessment by the Ghana Highway Authority estimated a maintenance funding gap running into hundreds of millions of US dollars across the national trunk road network.
The State Transport Company’s involvement in Monday’s crash adds another institutional dimension. STC, a state-owned enterprise operating on a corridor it cannot service safely at current road standards, raises questions about whether government-owned transport operators should continue running high-frequency services on structurally deficient infrastructure without a parallel commitment to road upgrading. The liability question, both financial and political, sits with the state on both counts.
Three governance mechanisms have demonstrably failed simultaneously on the Accra-Kumasi corridor:
Fixing any one of these in isolation produces marginal gains. Addressing all three in sequence, with the road’s physical dualization as the non-negotiable foundation, is the only intervention that changes the corridor’s fatality trajectory.
For investors and logistics operators active in Ghana, the highway’s condition is a material risk factor. Insurance premiums for freight on the Accra-Kumasi route reflect elevated accident probability. Supply chain planners building distribution networks for goods moving under AfCFTA preferences must account for unpredictable transit times caused by crash-related closures. The Ghana Investment Promotion Centre’s efforts to attract manufacturing and agro-processing investment to the Ashanti and Brong-Ahafo regions are structurally undermined by a transport corridor that cannot guarantee reliable throughput.
Parliament’s Roads and Transport Committee holds constitutional oversight authority over the Ministry of Roads and Highways and the Ghana Highway Authority. That authority is meaningful only if it produces binding recommendations with implementation timelines and budget allocations attached. Osei Nyarko’s statement that the highway demands attention “devoid of politics” is a reasonable starting point, but parliamentary oversight committees have the institutional tools to go further: public hearings, budget scrutiny, and formal referrals to the Public Accounts Committee when Road Fund disbursements cannot be accounted for against network condition outcomes.
The Accra-Kumasi Highway does not need another ministerial statement. It needs a legally structured, multi-year dualization program with a dedicated financing envelope, independent of the annual appropriations cycle, and a parliamentary oversight mechanism with the mandate and political will to enforce delivery across administrations.
