‘Focus on roads will boost socioeconomic development’

Dr Joseph Kwadwo Tuffour, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director, Research and Consultancy Centre, University of Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA), has hailed the government’s decision to make 2020 “The Year of Roads”.

Dr Tuffour noted that one of the biggest challenges facing Ghana was the lack of adequate infrastructure such as roads.

Speaking to the Ghana News Agency in Accra in reaction to the government’s 2020 Budget and Economic Policy Statement, Dr Tuffour said providing good roads and rails would go a long way to accelerate the nation’s socioeconomic development.

 Dr Tuffour said bad roads had negative effects on the economy; adding that it makes vehicles to break down quickly and sometimes leads to loss of lives through road accidents.

He said the road infrastructure improvement or development of new ones and enhancement of existing ones was key to Ghana’s socioeconomic development.

 “Otherwise it’s going to delay a lot of things, cost of production will go up, cost of delivery of supply and other items are going to be affected negatively which is not good for the economy,” he said.

 He said bad road networks would negatively affect timelines in conveying food stuff from the hinterlands to market centres, which would in turn go a long way to affect the prices, and also affect the standard of living.

He lauded the government’s performance over the past two years. “If we look at gross domestic product (GDP) growth we see improvement, inflation is relatively better, deficit is being reduced and other indicators have improved; generally, the government is doing well,” he said.

Dr Tuffour said there were two things; what the indicators were saying, which seems to be good but there was also another thing where people actually want to see how it translate into their standards of living. “And that is where for me, I say that a lot more needs to be done.”