ITS engineer
Accra, Ghana
Joined July 2018
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santy retweeted
But in Sika Mpoano, inviting the FM to respond to discrepancies in documents HE presented is "against the tenets of journalism".
Clown Republic
You may have missed the point of the article. It doesn’t claim no studies ever existed. It argues that if older studies were done (even going back to 2019), they needed to be published alongside updated ones before full deployment. A year is already a long time in traffic demand and land-use change; seven years is a different road network.
If those studies were revised, make the revisions public. If consultations happened, publish the conclusions and responses to stakeholder concerns. The article specifically called for this transparency. The volume of pushback from operators, policy groups, and drivers, with little public evidence of prior consultation outcomes, is exactly why the questions remain.
santy retweeted
Where were the idiots using "if you went to driving school you know the speed limits" as an excuse for the poor enrollment of this system?
This is why the Ghanaian public must never stop speaking up.
Ghanaians raised concerns about the lack of speed limit signs and speed camera warnings under TraffiTech-GH, and the authorities have listened.
From November 9, new speed limit and camera warning signs are expected to go up on affected roads.
The public spoke. The authorities listened. Action is following. 👏🏾🇬🇭
Road safety enforcement must come with clear road signs and public education. Isn't that how it should be?
You’ve been apt on this and your framing around this policy has been spot on. This tracks closely with what I argued in my earlier article on fine proportionality and the practical/technical problems with poorly scoped or unsigned limits: kasantejr.substack.com/p/whe…
I think what I’ll do next is dig into a research paper I have on RFID system lapses and how they apply here.
I recently put on my *anti-fraud tech* hat (the vocation that pays my bills) to review Traffitech, the new automated traffic ticket/fine system in Ghana. Here is what I found.
1. You would notice that the base Traffitech fine of GHS 240 is more than 11x the minimum wage in Ghana.
2. So, minimum-wage earners must work for 11 days to pay each fine.
3. The median income in Ghana is ~GHS 2130 a month. Among informal workers, it is GHS 1200. And in Greater Accra, it is GHS 3000.
4. It is true that drivers who own their own cars tend to earn higher than the median wage. But a very large number of drivers on the road are commercial drivers who earn around the 3000 - 4000 a month mark.
5. One of the attached charts show you how the fines escalate against the disposable income of such drivers.
6. All of this to say that we should pay attention to COMPLIANCE as a function of AFFORDABILITY. If people simply can't pay, they will not pay. As the fines pile up, the ability to pay worsen.
7. It is not surprising that before the Kenyan scheme was suspended, compliance rate (people actually paying the fine) was a mere 16% and that in Cote D'Ivoire the authorities had to introduce an option to pay in installments.
8. Compare that with compliance rates of 75% in Berlin, 67% in Chicago, and 70% in New South Wales (Australia).
9. Apart from income, I would argue that a major factor for higher compliance rates in the above places compared to what we have seen in Africa is the SENSE OF FAIRNESS.
10. If drivers begin to feel that the whole scheme is arbitrary and it is hard to modify your behavior to avoid fines because the speed limits are hard to scope and determine, compliance will fall and arrears will pile up.
11. Something else will then happen: FRAUD.
12. Last year, the UK authorities launched operation phantom, an exercise to detect car number plates deliberately tampered with to avoid automated tickets and fines.
13. Special cameras called "Sentio Ghost" were acquired from a company called Redspeed for the effort. Within 2 weeks, 4,335 ghost plates were recorded. Another provider, MAV, detected 1000 such plates at the Dartford Crossing. (Sensys Gatso, Ghana's provider, doesn't seem to have developed such tech.)
14. Researchers at UT Austin (Texas) recently showed how with $100 anyone can create a simple rim unobvious to the naked eye that reduces the performance of even the most advanced cameras by 60%. And now there are simple sprays that do similar things.
15. The situation is made worse by the poor street lighting in Ghana that makes using other spectra beside infra-red much harder.
16. Capitalism means that if the number of evaders grow, the supply of "ghosting" tools will increase and costs will fall. Meanwhile, Mr. Frank Osei and Sensys Gatso will counter by pushing for more higher-tier cameras, which will drop revenue. But less revenue would also limit the ability to spread the system. See chart.
17. At any rate, research shows that in this fraud "arms race", the cost advantage is on the side of the criminals.
18. As the chart shows, there aren't easy answers about how to address these complex feedback loops. But, for sure, the idea that fines have to be kept high to serve as a deterrence is not all that smart.
kasantejr.substack.com/p/whe…
for your read
Just dropped my two cents on Substack about speeding and the rollout of traffic tech.
your morning read:
kasantejr.substack.com/p/whe…
santy retweeted
Fact-checking the South Africa evacuation ledger
@JoyNewsOnTV has released the full documentary | part 1
youtube.com/watch?v=t3r1kfrT…
santy retweeted
Need we be reminded that it’s in our interest for journalists to be audacious and flippant?
What good does it do us if they’re “decorous” towards politicians, whose seductive power averagely paid journos are supposed to scrutinise with probing intent?
I’m very curious.
santy retweeted
First of all, don’t take lessons on good journalism from Kevin Taylor’s enabler.
Also, if it’s about accountability, journalism OUGHT to be ADVERSARIAL to justify itself. Rapprochement and camaraderie won’t save it
Sometimes, “working together” means a rambunctious call-out too
“As a trained journalist myself, I believe that it pushes the limits of media zealotry when a journalist publicly challenges a minister to call into his show to expose him over a so-called discrepancy that the journalist has discovered. We must work together in the spirit of civility and decorum to uphold the public interest.”
President John Dramani Mahama made the remarks at the GJA Media Awards, cautioning journalists against what he described as media zealotry.
#PresidentMahama #GJAMediaAwards #Journalism #MediaFreedom #GhanaNews #ChannelOneTV #CitiFM
santy retweeted
We have different roads with different speed limits so obviously making speed limit a one size fits all and punishing people for it is moronic and obviously not about road safety, just extortion.
santy retweeted
Because of limited time, I could not do the full breakdown of the Beirut cocaine bust and the NACOC "controlled delivery" narrative.
Here are the key issues that our research has established and possible measures the government should take to set minds at ease.
1. We have serious respect and sympathy for the work of security agencies like NACOC who operate under significant resource constraints. The work is not easy. And they certainly need some secrecy to do that hard work.
2. At the same time, compromised or incompetent security can cause citizens serious harm. So we need to balance circumspection with scrutiny. The only way to do that is through SERIOUS RESEARCH.
3. We have been painstakingly looking into the Beirut cocaine bust issue and the evidence gathered so far is worrisome.
4. A controlled delivery is not something done on the spur of the moment. If Ghana and Lebanon jointly executed a controlled delivery exercise, multiple security agencies on both sides would have had to be involved.
5. The right person to tell us emphatically that this was the case in this instance is the Interior Minister, who has interagency perspective and broad oversight. This goes beyond NACOC.
6. The laws in Ghana and Lebanon require multiple sign-offs before a controlled delivery can occur. A. The Director General of NACOC must sign. B. In Lebanon, the Public Prosecutor must authorise with the DG of Customs, and then the Counter-Narcotics Bureau (NACOC's counterpart there) of the ISF must supervise.
7. Because multiple agencies have interception, inspection, arrest, and various duties, rights, and involvements at both airports (Accra and Beirut), one cannot do a controlled delivery without top bosses at multiple agencies being aware and without ground commanders being in the loop.
8. Without such safeguards, an inadvertent inspection or interception during screening could derail the whole "controlled delivery" exercise. Or lead to a tip-off to the cartel, causing serious damage.
9. We have checked with some of the people who SHOULD BE IN THE KNOW and they deny foreknowledge of this operation.
10. We have also reviewed how Lebanon communicates about joint and controlled delivery operations with foreign agencies in multiple incidents and their standard approach differs from what happened in this case.
11. In 2014, NACOC lied about a similar joint operation and controlled delivery exercise. The UK denied their involvement. The NACOC (then NACOB) board was dissolved. In other instances where there was genuine collaboration (like Operation GRID), the UK openly acknowledged.
12. So, we have both good and bad precedents that should guide us as a country.
13. Most worryingly of all, we found out about a serious incident in late 2025 when a bigger haul of cocaine (70kg) from Ghana was folded into a coconut oil consignment and sent to Beirut. NAFDAC HAS NEVER PUBLICLY ACKNOWLEDGED THIS INCIDENT UNTIL TODAY.
14. We undertook our own investigations and built a dossier on a network of freight forwarders operating in Accra and Tema who have had similar brushes with the law and in each case somehow wiggle out and continue to ply their trade.
15. Only a proper INDEPENDENT inquiry can assure us that this situation is really under control. We shall submit our dossier regarding the cartel behind the 2025 cocaine smuggling episode once such an inquiry is in place and we have assurances from the highest authorities about the safety of our investigators.
Herh , it gets worse in the threads 😭
Kalyjay is misread. In fact, it is very easy to misanalyse him, especially if you don’t account for his capacity—Lord knows I want to say depth—for these matters.
I’ll bet this is his serious, honest, simplistic, view of it. Added to being a shadow comms operative for Gov’t.
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Ah yes, pure brilliance. Truly shocking that the gov’t hasn’t thought of something this obvious yet. Anyone know why that is?
The solution to removing the people selling Infront of the pavements be very simple. Fine institutions, companies and buildings that have people selling around their premises.
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