Rails build economies, roads build popularity: A plea for infrastructure maturity

Ghana’s persistent under-investment in railways relative to roads is not an accident of resource scarcity. It is a rational political calculation in a polity that rewards visibility over value. Roads are visible, divisible, and electorally profitable within a single cycle. Railways are structural infrastructure whose returns mature beyond electoral horizons. Until we build institutions that protect long-horizon capital from short-horizon politics, every government — regardless of party — will continue to choose paint over cement, and we shall continue to pay for that choice in fuel imports, road deaths, maintenance liabilities, and a stunted industrial base.

1. The political economy of visibility

Travel along any newly tarred stretch in Ghana and you will see the political logic at work. Ribbon-cutting ceremonies, branded signage, community durbars. Roads are political currency because they are seen. They are also divisible into hundreds of small contracts, distributable as patronage across constituencies, and deliverable within a single electoral term.

Railways offer none of these political conveniences. A rail corridor is a single large contract. Its construction unfolds along sleepers and ballast that the average voter never visits. Its returns accrue not to a constituency but to the national economy in aggregate. And its full economic case matures over decades, long after the commissioning Minister has left office.

We are, regrettably, a population that values paint far more than cement. That immaturity is being exploited, and we are excited because we are immature. The corrective is not exhortation, but institutional reform.

2. Construction-phase economics: Shallow breadth versus deep depth

Road construction is labour-light and capital-light per kilometre. It draws on bitumen, aggregates, casual labour, and a narrow band of civil engineering skills. Most of the value chain is informal and domestic — quarrying, haulage, day labour. The visible activity is broad but shallow.

Railway construction is capital-heavy and skills-intensive. It demands steel rails, sleepers, ballast, signalling systems, traction power, and rolling stock. It requires structural engineers, signalling specialists, surveyors, geotechnical experts, and heavy fabrication capacity. Where local content is enforced — as it must be — railway projects can seed entire industrial sub-sectors: sleeper plants, fabrication yards, signalling assembly. Roads do not generate such industrial spin-offs. They generate potholes.

3. Short-term impact (Zero to three years)

In the immediate construction phase, roads generate dispersed, low-skill employment with rapid wage circulation in local economies along the corridor. The multiplier is real, but it is shallow and short-lived. Once the contractor demobilises, the stimulus ends.

Railways generate more concentrated employment at higher skill levels and higher wages, with longer project durations of four to seven years for meaningful corridors. Foreign exchange leakage is admittedly higher in this phase because of imported rolling stock and signalling, though this can be offset where financing is concessional or where local content thresholds are enforced.

4. Medium-term impact (Three to 10 years)

It is in this window that the economic divergence becomes stark, and the political bias against rail becomes most costly.

Roads, once built, impose ongoing maintenance costs that compound rapidly under heavy axle loads. The articulated trucks hauling cargo from Tema and Takoradi to the interior and the Sahel destroy our pavement faster than the budget can repair it. Within five to seven years, the visible benefit of new tarmac decays into the invisible cost of potholes. The road maintenance backlog is itself the evidence of this trap.

Roads also impose externalised costs the budget rarely captures. The 2,949 road traffic deaths recorded in 2025 — an 18.2 per cent increase on the previous year — are not an accounting line, but they are an economic loss of staggering magnitude. So is the fuel import bill, and so is the pavement damage subsidised by the general taxpayer.

Railways in this window begin to demonstrate their core economic case. Unit cost of freight haulage on rail is typically 30 to 50 per cent lower than road over distances above 300 kilometres. Energy consumption per tonne-kilometre is roughly one-quarter that of road haulage. For Ghana — moving cocoa, manganese, bauxite, cement, and increasingly containerised cargo from the ports — this is the corridor where rail pays for itself many times over. Passenger services on commuter lines such as Accra–Nsawam and Takoradi–Kojokrom decongest urban roads, reducing fuel imports and recovering productive hours lost to traffic.

5. Long-term impact (10 years and beyond)

Roads, even when well-maintained, plateau in their economic contribution. They enable mobility, but they do not by themselves restructure an economy. The marginal road in a network with adequate coverage delivers diminishing returns.

Railways, by contrast, are structural infrastructure. They shape industrial location decisions over decades. The integrated bauxite–aluminium industry that Ghana has discussed for fifty years cannot be built on roads. It requires rail. The same is true for any serious revival of middle-belt industrialisation, for landlocked-country transit revenue from Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, and for the rail components of any credible 24-Hour Economy logistics architecture.

Rail also locks in lower lifetime carbon intensity, which is becoming a tradeable asset under emerging carbon border adjustment regimes affecting our exports to the European Union and the United Kingdom. A road-dominated freight economy is, increasingly, a tariff-exposed economy.

6. Why good governments make bad choices

The diagnosis must not be reduced to bad faith. Successive governments — of all political colours — have chosen roads over rail for the same rational reason. Roads are politically profitable; rail is statesmanship. In a four-year electoral cycle, statesmanship is a luxury few politicians can afford.

That is precisely why this decision must be removed from the electoral cycle. The corrective is institutional, not rhetorical:

First, ring-fenced rail financing — a dedicated fund insulated from annual budget cycles, capitalised through a combination of port levies, fuel duty, and concessional borrowing.

Second, multi-year capital commitments enforceable across electoral transitions, so that a corridor begun under one government cannot be quietly abandoned under the next.

Third, a transparent cost-benefit framework that prices in externalities — road deaths, fuel imports, maintenance liabilities, carbon exposure — and presents the true comparative cost of road versus rail to Parliament and to the public.

Fourth, a local content regime that ensures railway investment seeds Ghanaian industrial capacity rather than leaking entirely to foreign suppliers.

7. Conclusion

A polity that rewards paint over cement will systematically under-invest in the infrastructure that builds nations. Until we mature as voters — until we learn to demand value rather than visibility — we shall keep watching ribbons being cut on roads that will be potholes within a decade, while the rail corridors that could have carried our industrial future remain weeds and rusted track.

The question is not whether Ghana can afford to build railways. The question is whether Ghana can afford not to.

The writer is immediate past President of Ghana Institute of Safety and Environment Professionals (2016-2022), Road Safety Advocate and Traditional Ruler

BY NANA ANNOR AMIHERE II

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