What unfolded on the Accra–Kumasi highway after the December 31 watch night service is one of the most alarming national security and traffic management failures in recent memory.
More than 72 hours after the event, traffic congestion directly linked to this gathering continued to cripple movement on Ghana’s busiest and most strategic highway. On the night itself, the road was effectively shut down for nearly eight continuous hours. Vehicles were at a standstill. Nothing moved.
Ambulances were trapped. Travellers missed international flights. Sick and vulnerable persons were placed in grave danger. Thousands of ordinary road users were subjected to harsh, inhumane conditions on a national trunk road that should never be allowed to fail.
This crisis is even more troubling when one considers the fragile state of the Accra–Kumasi highway, narrow, overstretched, and operating far beyond its intended capacity. Any reckless activity along this corridor is guaranteed to produce chaos. This incident simply confirmed what experts have warned for years.
Let it be stated without ambiguity:
The individual at the centre of this disruption is a private citizen conducting a private enterprise under the banner of a church. Prophet Adom Kyei Duah chose to organise a mass roadside programme without adequate traffic planning, effectively holding an entire nation hostage to his personal religious activity.
No private individual,religious or otherwise, should ever be permitted to paralyse a national highway and endanger lives. Freedom of worship does not include the freedom to compromise national security, public safety, or the free movement of citizens.
Equally disturbing is the lack of proactive intervention from the Police MTTD, whose mandate includes preventing precisely this kind of foreseeable disruption on critical national roads. This was not a minor inconvenience. It was a dangerous breach with clear national security implications.
This incident must force Ghana to confront a long‑standing reality:
A country of our size, population, and economic importance cannot continue to rely on a single major road linking Accra and Kumasi.
The time has come for multiple corridors between the two cities. Ghana must build a modern expressway while maintaining the existing highway for different categories of traffic. Redundancy is not a luxury, it is a basic requirement for national resilience, security, and economic continuity.
For this reason, Asante Nation fully supports the Accra–Kumasi Expressway Project. Ghana urgently needs purpose‑built highways that separate long‑distance, high‑speed travel from local and community activity.
But we must issue a strong caution:
After constructing the expressway, authorities must not repeat the mistakes of the past. No churches, mass markets, event centres, or private developments should be permitted to spring up along the expressway in ways that compromise traffic flow or safety. An expressway defeated by roadside congestion would be a national embarrassment.
This incident must serve as a national wake‑up call, not only for one church or one watch night service, but for all mass public events across the country. Traffic impact assessments, crowd control plans, emergency access routes, and environmental and noise evaluations must become mandatory before any permit is issued.
Ghana cannot build critical national infrastructure with one hand and undermine it with regulatory indiscipline with the other.
Public safety, national mobility, and national security must always come first.
Source: The Asante Nation
