A great number of anxious passengers were in queues to board unavailable State Transport buses on Sunday, 28 April 2024. Most of the travelers abandoned the Sunday journey and waited till the next day only to face long, winding queues with only three buses to contend with.
The maximum passenger intake of each bus is 31. The passengers are in the hundreds. The numbers skyrocket if you throw a view further afield.
Those waiting in the long queues are skipped but new arrivals are called aside and charged exorbitantly and given buses. The fare is 120 cedis, they allegedly charge between 160 and 200 before giving seats to the latter.
This scarcity is in the Ashanti regional capital, Kumasi. What caused the bus shortage crisis is not immediately known, but some observers believe a lot of Ashantis living in Accra came to Kumasi to participate in Asantehene’s Silver Jubilee Anniversary.
Adjoined to the State Transport Yard in Asafo, Kumasi is its competitor the VIP transport terminal. There too, the crowds are overwhelming, causing a fret in travelers.
Between Accra and Kumasi, the two largest cities in Ghana, are active air transport but soaring air ticket prices are not within the affordance of the average traveler.
It is a spectre that Ghana, a country that abounds in natural resources, actively collects taxes, and with significant international in-flows, falls short of a rail link between her two largest urban settlements. Traveling on trains could have been a reliable alternative to roads.
The smallness of air and rail transport has made transportation by road most relevant in Ghana, yet the latter is fraught with teething challenges, one of which has surfaced in Kumasi – shortage of buses.
