As a rule, I am really not fond of politicians (apart from a few) and none less than Mr George Walker Bush, the President of the USA, who has been visiting Accra this week. But I understand that even Bush's fans were outraged at the security overkill that went into "protecting" our guest. I know that, unfortunately, there are many people in the world who might want to do great harm to Mr Bush and we all don't want that to happen. I could not have designed a better week, even if I was the designer of weeks, because by sheer coincidence I found myself in the Bush-less Ashanti and Northern regions during the invasion. This was heaven-sent because even ordinarily, I like to leave Accra as often as possible and couldn't care less if the whole place disappeared while I was away. The journey to Kumasi must be a pleasant one, and always is so, but only in my dreams. As a child and later teenager, I travelled on countless occasions to Kumasi from Accra and Koforidua and never got tired of that journey. It was by train and it passed through lush vegetation on both sides of the track. Sometimes if you stuck your head out of a window a tree branch actually brushed you on the face, sometimes quite hard. When I was in the university, things got even better because I used to do the journey by "sleeper" train, which had actual sleeping compartments. No one slept, because the train was usually packed with students from other institutions all going on vacation. We maintained a carnival atmosphere throughout the journey. One particular trip stood out, because the train developed engine trouble at a small village between Nsawam and Koforidua. It was a moonlit night and hundreds of students sang and danced with the village youth who provided what they could by way of food and drinks throughout the night. No one was much bothered that the train was going nowhere. We kept up the good humour and mass entertainment until the engine was replaced the following morning. It was only in the early morning half light that I discovered that one of the people I left behind in the compartment when I joined the village invasion was the late Mr. P.A. Owiredu, my Sixth Form Headmaster at Apam Secondary School. Those memories still make me sentimental about trips to Kumasi, although the reality quickly dispels any lingering nostalgia. To begin with, we don't travel by train in Ghana any more, which to me is one more illustration of the backward march of this country over the past 30 years. So trains are out and road trans¬port is in at a huge cost. As long as I remember, the Accra-iKumasi road has always been under construction. There has never been a time when the whole stretch has been a completed road, which adds to the anxiety that sets in the moment one hits the road. It is impossible to make a realistic estimate of the time one will spend travelling on that road. The "stop-go" delay which occurs when only half of the road can be used at a time is a mobile inconvenience moving from one stretch to the other. However, overall, the road is much better now than it has ever been in living memory; the good parts are very good and the road design is far more professional and better thought through than is the case generally in the country. However, there is a 30-mile stretch leading to Kumasi that has been strewn with a number of roundabouts that serve no purpose apart from slowing traffic. I think the person who designed that stretch liked it because it appeared rather pretty on paper and perhaps from the air, surveyed from a hovering helicopter, it would look swell too. But at the ground level, the design is a hideous impediment to good and safe driving. Then there is the speed. Driving on the Accra-Kumasi road is like travelling on a free-for-all car racing championship circuit. Some cars travel at a speed that would shock the manufacturer, while others overtake with such daring that even the Taleban would reject them as too reckless to be recruited as suicide bombers. There is also the persistent issue of bullying and road rage by the big trucks on the road. This has been an issue dating back to the 1970s when articulated trucks start¬ed replacing the railways as the haulage vehicle of choice. For some reason, drivers of these are more entitled to use the road than other road users so they actually drive other vehicles off when they can do so and get away with it. I think that the Acheampong government got it right when it banned big trucks from driving after six in the evening. It was a good decision because it saved lives, and there is no reason why the same law cannot be enacted and even refined. There are so many articulated trucks and smaller vehicles that are victims of articulated trucks bullying lying by the roadside that you wonder if anyone is monitoring driving on this particular road. There are some police officers along the way who are expected to ensure that the normal rules of driving and laws of road usage apply on the Accra-Kumasi road, but let me say politely that they do nothing of the sort, or maybe they do so in some mysterious kind of way, but that is for another time. The evidence is that they have so far not been very effective. Perhaps the truth is that no amount of policing and public education can reduce the number of accidents on the Accra-Kumasi road, because essentially a single track road linking the two major cities in the country is woefully inadequate in a country that adds thousands of new vehicles every month. The trouble is this, there is a mix of very fast, fast, slow and very slow traffic on the two single tracks that make up the busiest road in the country. The result of having to think about all these risks on the Kumasi road means that putting a very big distance between me and Mr Bush has not been as comfortable as I expected to feel, but travelling on this road is almost as hazardous as meeting the man in person. Nowhere cool. Source: Kwasi Gyan-Apenteng/The Mirror gapenteng@hotmail.com