Tricycles Replacing Taxi Cabs In Wa Municipality

The people of Wa in the Upper West Region have found an easy way of carrying goods and people from one place to another in the Municipality at a cheap cost. The new trend has created the opportunity for some shop owners to use tricycles to cart their goods from the lorry stations to their shops. The tricycles, popularly known as Motor Kings�, and which can be found in every corner of the Wa Municipality, are being used by some individuals for commercial transport services. Motor Kings have become the preferred choice of many traders and the poor who want to cart their goods from one place to another. They are fast taking over the work of the traditional taxi and four-wheeled push-trucks being trundled around lorry parks by young boys. In the Wa Municipality it is an open secret that some owners of rickety taxi cabs and tro-tros have sold them off to buy �Motor Kings�, whose drivers reportedly make a lot of revenue per day, and yet do not pay income tax or levies to the local authority. Other road users, especially big buses and cargo trucks, complain that the �Motor Kings� are becoming a nuisance, and see them as a death trap on the road. However, their continuous existence as commercial vehicles in the Wa Municipality is being threatened, and they may soon be flushed out of the commercial vehicle industry, because their type of registration does not allow them to operate as commercial vehicles. �They are to be used for the private transportation of goods. For instance, goods from the market to the shop, or one�s farm produce to the market centre for sale,� the Upper West Regional Director of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA), Mr. Emmanuel Klugah, told The Chronicle in a telephone interview. He said it was illegal for any motorbike, irrespective of the make, to engage in commercial transportation in Ghana, because they are registered as a private means of transport. Currently, there are about 800″Motor Kings� operating on a commercial basis in the Wa Municipality alone, and out of this number, about two-thirds are not registered, while none of them is insured as a commercial vehicle. The DVLA boss complained that these bikes are ironically, fast becoming a means of transportation for some market women in the rural areas. Mr. Klugah said people who patronise these bikes do so at their own risk, and would not be compensated in the event of an accident, because the bikes are not insured. Some of the riders of the tricycles, fully aware of the illegal nature of their work, however, told this reporter that the �Motor King� was their only source of income to run their homes and support their dependants. They appealed to the government to come out with a policy that would allow �motor kings� to be registered to operate as commercial transport. Meanwhile, the Wa Municipal Chief Executive, Issahaku Nuhu Putiaha, said the Assembly would come out with bye-laws to stop the use of the �Motor King� in the night, as they sometimes cause accidents in the municipality.