By Mabinty M. Kamara
As they joined the world to commemorate the global road Safety week, the Executive Director of the Sierra Leone Road Safety Authority, Ibrahim Sannoh has called on the government to support the authority with funds needed to carry out its safety operations.
The Executive Director made this statement at a joint engagement on Thursday 6th May 2021 with the Ministry of Transport and Aviation to orientate the media on road safety issues and the Integrated Resilient Urban Mobility Project aimed at transforming the transport management sector and to decongest Freetown.
Speaking at the event which was climaxed by the launch of the authority’s strategic document spanning from 2020 to 2024, Sannoh highlighted a number of reform measures to be undertaken by his institution such as the ratification of treaties and convention on road safety and speed management, driver’s license standardization policy which will lead to curriculum development for the driving schools, and the introduction of ambulance services at strategic points along highways among others.
However, he said they were limited by financial resources to support those ventures leading to the drop in the number of road crashes by 50% as opposed to what unfolds now.
He added that road crashes have over the years been the leading cause of death among the population mostly due to human error on the road like over speeding, drunk driving, poor vehicle maintenance amongst others.
He said with the limited amount of Breathalyzers provided by the Sierra Leone Brewery to the authority and the ones he got from his visit to the Federal road safety corps in Nigeria, they were able to do some testing during the Easter holiday and realized that about 60% of the drivers on the high ways were driving drunk. He said because of the limited number available, and the fact that festive seasons are periods when drunk driving is common, they have decided to reserve the few to be used during festivities until they have enough in their possession before they could regularize its operation.
“On the issue of the breathalyzer, the Sierra Leone road safety is not sub-vented meaning we do not get proceeds from the government and prior now it was Sierra Leone Roads Authority but adopting safety now is very costly. Safety is very costly for example in our strategic plan we have very ambitious things to do like we want to have post-crash mechanisms at our major high ways we want to have post stop mechanisms at 91 and other places with ambulance facilities all of these we are putting in place in order to have first responders,” he said.
He added: “This is why we are appealing for a takeoff grant we don’t get subvention from the government. The authority is being run from the proceeds we generate from licenses and other fees and 10% of these fees are being retain at IMFA for road safety issues. So we need the media and the civil society to help our ministry and by extension the SLRSA in our clarion call so that we can have a budgetary allocation from the central government. So that budgetary allocation will be tailored only for safety activities so that we can achieve all of these goals.”
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