Traffitech-GH went live on 1 November. Almost immediately, five Ghanaian transport unions declared a strike for 4 November. Despite framing their grievances around poor road traffic infrastructure, a pointed line in their statement makes it clear what the fight is really about: “We cannot operate in bus stops occupied by traders and still be fined by cameras.”

When the idea of automating fines for bad driving using cameras first reared its head, I asked if the Police can truly transcend katanomics. I asked because katanomics can turn even brilliant, obvious, and inevitable ideas into a mess of absurdities.

If the road network and ancillary structures themselves are disorganised, it becomes unreasonable to automate fines as if each offence is straightforward. A major part of why current manual police enforcement of traffic rules is the way it is is that it has to apply judgement to adjust strict rules to the reality of a pervasive physical mess.  

But the state has chosen to bring a very modern way to punish people for disorder caused by a very old mess. Standard katanomics.

The “WHAT” is always easy to sell. In this case, it is simply “stop the carnage”. And the carnage is real. Road crashes killed 2,949 people in 2025, the highest in 35 years. Who can oppose “doing something about it”? But as katanomics teaches, we always pay little attention to “the HOW”. So it escapes scrutiny, and every awkward question gets treated as an attack on progress. This mindset of thinking that intentions and attempts are enough is the biggest impediment to real progress in Ghana because those who call it out would always come across as unreasonable.

Other times, sloppy preparatory work is excused with the argument that it is best to start and improve later. Which isn’t totally ridiculous except that it presumes that national learning is a giving. The whole mission of katanomics is to show how and why such learning almost never happens. Citizens should just look around them and pay attention to the whole host of initiatives that were began on just this premise and stayed sloppy forever. Remember a certain sugar factory?

Now that the cameras are rolling, the awkward questions about Traffitech will continue to multiply. I am writing this piece purely for future reference. And as part of the documentation for teaching katanomics.

Guess the limit

The MTTD now concedes that Traffitech-GH is limited to speeding and that “[for] other offences, we will continue to enforce them manually”. In August, the Interior Minister was telling us it covered more than 47 offences. Essentially, all the rancour is about addressing, what, 2% of the problem? Hard to say, as research into which offences cause the most harm hasn’t been conducted for eons.

But even with respect to speeding, the most basic question confronting every driver as the system rolls out has been left murky: how fast am I allowed to go here?

The Police FAQ gives four answers: 50 km/h in built-up areas, 90 on highways, 100 on motorways, and 30 km/h within a school, playground, health facility, church, mosque, market, shopping centre or procession, or “anywhere human activity is predominant”.

Try to picture Accra or Kumasi as you read those words. How exactly does a zone of predominant human activity look like? Where does one begin and end? Does a highway become a market zone when the hawkers surge in? At what point does the driver accelerate again? In classic katanomic and state enchantment fashion, the state has bought cameras to measure speed to the kilometre but left motorists to figure out on their own the geography of offending.

The FAQ does promise signs at the start of enforced corridors and at “selected points” along them. Then it strips the promise of any value: “A licensed driver must be conversant with the above whether or not a speed-limit sign is posted.” And, of course, at launch time, the signs were nowhere to be found.

When drivers complain about faulty street & traffic lights and missing signs, ACP Alexander Obeng of the Police MTTD replies: “We should not mix the issues up.” Seriously?

On day one, ACP Obeng gave the game away. Announcing that some drivers had done over 130 km/h on Mahama Road, a 50 km/h road, he warned: “when the road is straight and flat in the city, don’t think it is a highway.” That is a policeman conceding that the road itself tells drivers one thing while the law says another. The usual remedy for that is called a sign.

It gets murkier because the police intend to rely heavily on moving cameras. The launch briefing confirmed that cameras have been placed in unmarked police vehicles and on tripods. But there is a world of difference between concealing the policeman and concealing the rule. CUTS International pointed out that L.I. 2519 itself provides for signage alongside speed cameras and asked that limits be posted before every camera. Clearly, as will soon become clear, the ambiguity is deliberately designed to serve the project’s financial goals.

The argument that motorists ought to know the rules by heart is rather rich. The revised Highway Code, launched in October 2023 to replace a version from 1974, predates the 2026 regulations and it shows. It has no provisions to cater for such dynamic shifts.

I doubt many have considered the issue of the speed units either. About 90 per cent of cars on Ghana’s roads are imported used vehicles, and many come from the United States, where speedometers tend to be set to miles per hour. The few signs that do exist only display a bare number, without units. As one safety professional noted in the Chronicle, a driver who sees “50” and holds steady at 50 on an American dial is actually driving at about 80 km/h.

None of this was unforeseen. In April 2018, the President’s road-safety plan promised GH¢335 million a year, for three years, for signs and road markings. Eight years later, the state has pushed out the fines. The signs may come later.

Even the price is a guess

You would think the fine, at least, would be clear. The graduated schedule for automated offences under Regulation 242 starts at GH¢120 for each of the first three offences. But in October, ACP Obeng told listeners that for speeding, “any 5 kilometers per hour above the limit… the penalty starts at 20 penalty units”, that is GH¢240, and rising. Other explainers put speeding at GH¢240 to GH¢480. Clearly, the murkiness is structural.

At least, the formula for late payments is more straightforward. If also brutal. After 14 days, 1 per cent of the fine is added for every day of default, with no published ceiling. That is a simple annual rate of ~365 per cent. A GH¢240 fine thus becomes GH¢480 after 100 days of default and GH¢1,116 after a year.

Meanwhile, amidst all this, the Roads Minister told Parliament in June that the state owes the companies that maintain traffic signals about GH¢40 million. The government doesn’t mind piling up arrears on the traffic lights needed for road safety, but drivers better not even dream of owing.

Looking in the wrong place

The next absurdity is geographic. Ghana’s road deaths are not, mostly, a downtown Accra problem.

In 2025, Ashanti recorded 692 deaths and Eastern 649, against 420 for Greater Accra, even though Greater Accra had the most crashes. The difference is lethality. The Eastern Region recorded 28 deaths per 100 crashes; Greater Accra recorded 10. People die on the long intercity stretches, at highway speeds, in head-on collisions and in the dark.

Even inside the capital, the city’s Accra Road Safety Report 2024 is clear on where to focus. Of 118 deaths in the Accra Metropolitan Area that year, 76 per cent happened on highways within the city, such as the N1, not on ordinary town streets. Hotspots included the Kwashieman intersection and the Ring Road Central corridor. More deaths occurred between 8 and 10 at night than in any other two-hour window, and half came on weekends. Vulnerable road users (pedestrians, motorcyclists and cyclists) were 86 per cent of the dead.

No one is saying that speeding in Accra isn’t an issue. Observational studies found that, on monitored roads in 2024, between 44 and 49 per cent of vehicles were over the limit. The question is whether a few dozen mobile camera units, launched first in towns, are aimed at tackling the deaths based on evidence or at opportunities to fine lots of people quickly. We asked the Police to publish the deployment plan against the crash map, including evening and weekend coverage, so the public can tell a safety hotspot from a profitable camera position. Didn’t happen.

We should also not lose sight of pedestrians in these conversations.

They account for about a third of all road deaths nationally. Currently, Traffitech can’t fine a pedestrian. Nor does a photograph of a collision course change the collision course. What is sorely needed are usable pavements, refuge islands, and raised crossing.

Few would disagree that motorcycles are the biggest blind spot. The NRSA says 226 of Greater Accra’s 420 road deaths in 2025, 54 per cent, involved motorbikes. In a single July operation against racing on the George Walker Bush Highway near Villaggio, police impounded 71 motorcycles, 26 of them unregistered. The DVLA says about 5 per cent of all number plates in use are fake, often copied from wrecked cars. How will Traffitech text registered owners when registration records don’t exist? The properly documented motorist thus becomes conveniently billable. While undocumented menaces continue to roam the street, unpoliced.

Meanwhile, many of the deadliest highway behaviours in Accra are not even very susceptible to automated camera enforcement. A speed gun cannot judge an overtake on a blind bend, fatigue at the wheel, or why someone swerved. All this takes evidence and judgement, and you can’t delegate it to a single speed reading.

The lights are out

Apparently red-light cameras will come later. But some of the issues are comical.

An April 2026 Department of Urban Roads assessment found only 257 of 411 traffic signal installations working. A 2025 survey by the National Safety Campaign found only 13 per cent of traffic lights in Accra and surrounding cities fully functional. The Roads Minister blames people stripping signal parts for scrap, while the maintenance firms wait for their GH¢40 million. CUTS found signals near the Apenkwa overpass and the Police Training Academy junction in Tesano shifted out of clear view while the cameras appeared correctly positioned. Total confusion.

The Accra Intelligent Traffic Management System was part of a US$210.6 million China Development Bank loanthat Ghana has collected and, as we say in these parts, chopped. In 2020, its US$100 million traffic contract was handed to Huawei under the Ministry of National Security. Its second phase is 23 per cent complete, held up by legal disputes, with a US$55 million judgement debt attached.

Finding money to keep the rules working is apparently a headache. So, why not just find investors to charge people for flouting those same rules?

Do you know your ringtone?

Traffitech fines are issued in an SMS to the registered car owner. That, naturally, assumes a well-functioning registry with an up-to-date owner phone directory.

Yet, the government’s 2024 PPP report on the Traffitech project found missing owner information in DVLA records and insurance files still stuck with brokers’ phone numbers. The Police FAQ adds that if you sold your car, you remain liable until the DVLA records the change of ownership and phone number. (By the way, the DVLA will re-register all four million-plus vehicles with new plates between January 2027 and December 2028.) Until then, expect a lot of people to rack up fines without knowing that they are.