The National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) has given a seven-month ultimatum to commercial road transport operators and other regulated entities to register with the Authority or be prepared to face severe sanctions.
Also, the Authority has directed owners of floating vehicles to join a transport union or form a company and be registered to operate legally before March 31, 2025.
The Director-General of the NRSA, David Osafo Adonteng, who gave the directive in an interview with the Daily Graphic, said the move was per the regulations of the National Road Safety Regulations, 2022 (LI 2468).
“The registration of the transport operators and commercial drivers will help us to get data on who is operating in the space, how they are operating and what safety mechanisms they have put in place to protect passengers,” he said.
He stressed that the NRSA was particularly concerned about the activities of floating drivers who did not belong to any union and therefore were unregulated and difficult to monitor.
“These drivers are not registered with any transport union; not registered as a company; and do not load from terminals or stations. They move from place to place and are not controlled by anybody.
“We call on them to begin to form unions or belong to a union or register with the Register of Companies as companies and come to the NRSA for a license to operate legally. If they fail to do so by March 31, we will use the law to stop them from operating,” he stressed.
The law
L.I 2468 requires the NRSA to keep a register of all institutions providing road transport and its related services to ensure that they operate within the law.
Some of the regulated entities as provided for in L. I 2468 are commercial road transport operators, ride-hailing transport companies, transport departments and units of ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), transport departments and units of private companies, institutional bus service providers and tyre service centres.
Regulation 92 of L. I 2468 states: “An entity or organisation which before the coming into force of these regulations operated a road transport service for commercial purpose shall, within two years of the coming into force of these regulations, comply with these regulations.”
The registration is meant to let the NRSA identify the transport entities individually and give them a license to operate.
Enforcement
The NRSA Director-General said given that L. I 2468 was enforceable from March 30, 2025, the NRSA had been engaging all stakeholders in the road safety sector, particularly the regulated entities, to drum home the need for them to register with the authority.
He noted that although some of the entities had registered with the NRSA, the patronage was not encouraging.
“We have done a lot of engagement and we believe that it is time to shift our focus towards enforcing the road safety standards and regulations going forward.
The NRSA Director-General urged the regulated entities to use the grace period of seven months to register with the authority because “next year will be different because we will move into full force of enforcement.”
Stringent measures
Mr Adonteng said apart from the registration with the NRSA, the authority had automated its systems and could monitor the in-traffic activities of drivers and would thus strengthen its monitoring regimes at all the regulated entities to ensure that road crashes were reduced.
He said the pre-departure checks would be strictly enforced at transport terminals and commercial vehicle stations to know the number of passengers they carry, the condition of the car and the driver before the vehicles hit the road.
Again, he said as a measure to ensure that drivers behave well on the road, the NRSA would train the drivers and put monitoring devices in their vehicles to enable them to track and monitor their movement daily.
Source: GraphicOnline
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