Horror in Ghana’s trotro system

There are two Ghanas moving on the same road.

One Ghana rides in air-conditioned comfort, protected, respected cars insulated from the dust, heat and humiliation of public transport.

The other Ghana rides in broken trotros, insulted, soaked by rain, extorted, endangered and treated like cargo instead of human beings.

And the greatest national shame is this: the people with power belong to the first Ghana, while the people with suffering belong to the second.

Government officials do not take trotro. Ministers do not fight for space on torn seats. Parliamentarians do not sit in vehicles where rain pours inside like a river. 

Senior officials do not argue with conductors over arbitrary fares.

They pass by in tinted SUVs, watching from behind glass as millions endure what they themselves would never tolerate for five minutes.

Why nothing changes

Because those who have the authority to fix it are personally protected from the consequences of their inaction, nothing changes.

Every day across this country, trotros operate as moving zones of humiliation. 

Conductors shout at passengers as if they are prisoners. Human beings who have paid for a service are insulted for asking questions.

People are forced to alight mid-journey after paying. Fares change with the conductor’s mood. No receipt. No explanation.

No accountability.

It is raw, unchecked power exercised against the powerless.

But the abuse does not end with words.

The vehicles themselves are a national disgrace on wheels.

Seats are torn open, their foam long gone, exposing hard metal skeletons that stab into the backs of passengers.

Some seats are broken completely, forcing people to hang on in awkward positions for hours.

The pain is constant, but the poor have learned to endure silently, because they have no alternative.

True horror revealed

When it rains, the true horror reveals itself.

Water pours through leaking roofs directly onto passengers.

Not drops; streams.

Clothes become soaked.

Important documents are destroyed.

Workers arrive at their jobs drenched, humiliated before they even begin their day. 

Many quietly admit a painful truth: when it rains inside some trotros, it would have been better to stand outside naked and let the rain beat you properly, than to sit inside that moving shame.

This is not transport.

This is punishment for being poor.

And then there are the tyres. Smooth. Bald. Finished.

Tires with no grip left to hold the road.

Tires that turn vehicles into uncontrolled missiles when the road is wet.

Brakes that barely respond. 

Doors that don’t close.

Engines that sound like they are begging to die.

These are not vehicles.

These are coffins on credit, transporting the living toward preventable tragedy.

Yet, somehow, they are allowed to operate freely in the full view of the Ghana Police Service.

Police officers stand at checkpoints every day.

They stop drivers.

They inspect vehicles.

They enforce compliance when they choose to.

But when a trotro approaches with torn seats, leaking roofs and death-trap tyres, something strange happens.

They do not see.

They wave them on.

They look away from the danger sitting in plain sight.

How does a police officer stop a private car for a minor offence but allows a trotro carrying twenty souls in a rolling wreck to continue?

This is not mere oversight. It is national hypocrisy in uniform.

Where is the Ministry of Transport?

And where is the Ministry of Transport in all this?

Do they not know these vehicles exist?

Do they not understand the daily suffering?

Or is it simply irrelevant because it does not affect them personally?

No minister will ever sit on those broken seats.

No elite will ever allow rain to soak them inside a vehicle. 

No powerful official will ever accept being transported in conditions that resemble abandonment.

Yet they allow millions of others to endure it every single day.

This is the clearest evidence that Ghana’s development has been selective, designed to protect comfort at the top while normalising suffering at the bottom.

And the abuse goes further.

There are no cameras inside trotros.

No monitoring.

No evidence.

No fear of consequences.

Drivers insult freely because nobody is watching.

Conductors extort freely because nobody is recording.

Dangerous vehicles operate freely because nobody is enforcing the law. 

The absence of cameras is not a technical problem.

It is a moral decision.

Because cameras would expose everything.

They would expose the insults.

They would expose the extortion.

They would expose the reckless driving.

They would expose the truth Ghana has learned to hide from itself. 

Instead, the state has chosen silence.

A country that can digitise banking, track mobile money and monitor elections, somehow cannot monitor the single most used form of transport for its working population.

This is not an inability.

This is a priority. And the message to the poor is clear: your suffering is acceptable.

Caution to elites: be warned

But let the elites be warned.

Every society is ultimately judged not by the comfort of its powerful, but by the dignity of its ordinary people.

Right now, Ghana’s trotro system is a daily monument to indifference.

It tells the market woman that her comfort does not matter. 

It tells the young worker that his safety does not matter.

It tells the ordinary citizen that their dignity has no urgency.

This is not just a transport failure. It is a leadership failure.

It is a moral failure. It is a national shame.

Until cameras are installed, until broken vehicles are removed, until police enforce standards without fear or favour, and until leaders experience the reality they have allowed to exist, every official who remains silent is not merely uninformed.

They are complicit.

Because a nation that watches its poor suffer in silence has already decided whose humanity matters and whose does not.

The question is whether the state has the moral courage to look at the poor and say: your dignity matters too.

Until then, every silent official is not a neutral observer.