Go straight, no bend no curve

Go straight, no bend no curve

By Doreen Hammond

At the South Gate of the Gatwick Airport in London stood Kwaku Manu in confusion, his eyes darting around like a clock as everyone passed him by in different directions, bound for different destinations.

Kwaku was to catch the Gatwick express to Seven Sisters where he was to meet someone to send him to the sister he was visiting in Enfield Town. The problem for him now was where to catch the train. The speed at which people passed him by and how focused they looked as they walked away made him unable to gather confidence to ask anyone for help as is the practice he was used to back home. But time was not on his side and his luggage was weighing him down so he had to do something fast.

Fortunately, he saw an information desk and walked there to find out where to locate the station.

“Where can I catch the Gatwick Express to Seven Sisters?" he asked.

The gentleman behind the desk pointed at the big signpost right where he had been standing in confusion and said, “There, Gatwick Express; big signboard, surely you couldn’t have missed it!"

But Kwaku Manu had missed it! He had concentrated on looking at the people moving up and down the station with the intention to ask questions rather than looking out for information on signposts.

Adoley’s ordeal was not any better. She arrived at the University of Exeter for a course and had to find her way to the hostel where she was to lodge. She was handed a map at the porter’s office to do so and that sent shivers down her spine! By the time she finally made meaning of the map and settled in her room, she had spent over an hour to get to the hostel which was not even five minutes from where she was given the map! The cold had dealt with her.

Certainly, Kwaku Manu and Adoley have something in common. They come from a place where signs of any type-- signposts, signboards, road signs and call signs; be they made of wood , metal or plastic ; carrying information of directions or addresses or rules and regulations, dos and don'ts, do not mean much. Not only do they come from Ghana but their kind appears to be many in this country!

The lack of importance we attach to signs have had serious consequences on our development as a people and continues to pose risks even to our lives. On the Accra – Kumasi road, as well as other roads where major construction works are in progress, drivers have been left on their own to figure out where to pass. There are no signs informing the driver as to where to pass and where not to. There are no signs showing where to branch off into Taifa, for instance; you just figure it out. Too bad if you can't; the result is the constant chaos and sometimes accidents on our roads.

Vehicles which break down en route are left on the road without warning triangles and motorists reach the scene too late to notice the tree branches scattered on the road as warning. Sometimes, the results of such inaction have been fatal; loss of lives on our roads.

A driver approaching a clearly marked zebra crossing rather decides to change the gear from third to fifth speed and approaches pedestrians honking and sometimes goes to the extent of putting on his headlights! Is that meant to frighten pedestrians or what?

We have not properly named and numbered our streets in a manner that would make them easily identifiable. If we finally get our Ambulance Service running as it should be, how would we get them to easily reach our homes to pick a woman in labour, for instance, to the hospital? How do we give the Fire Service precise directions to our home when it is on fire and time is of the essence? Even though our postal system seems to be gradually losing its role to new modes of communication like the e-mail and cell phone, the pain of many who have lost the opportunity to attend job interviews because letters lay in their boxes without their knowledge are still fresh to them. We cannot have letters easily delivered to us at home because we don’t have proper home addresses.

Most developed countries are now using the GPRS (Tomtom) to find locations. This is less time-consuming and stressful; unlike the merry go round we tend to do here. It is true we are a developing country but at the rate we are going, when would we be able to use such a facility since we would need to feed the equipment with addresses to enable it direct us to our destination? The sad thing is nothing and nobody appears to be doing anything about it.

Try visiting a friend for the first time and he gives you the direction of a big tree under which people often sit to play draught. Once there, you are to ask for Don’t mind your wife chop bar where you are to ask for a man known in the area as “Original”. Original is supposed to hold your hand and take you to the house you are looking for. So if on that day those people who play the draught do not come for the game under the tree, and “Original” decides to be absent, what happens? Your guess is as good as mine.

It is not as if we do not have signs at all. We do, even to the extent that some of them obstruct our vision at junctions and intersections. We seem to see these signs as more of decorative pieces than for the purpose of providing information and directions. So in a banking hall, for instance, where it is boldly written “Queue here”, we still have people coming to ask where to queue. Could this attitude be related to our low literacy rate? That may not entirely be the case because Adoley was a university student and Kwaku had completed senior high school.

Government after government has made pronouncements on how Ghana is the gateway to Africa and how tourism is being promoted to be one of the country’s major foreign exchange earners. Government delegations after delegations have embarked on trips to woe investors into the country.

But what are we inviting investors to? For investors to maintain their interest in a country, certain things must be in place. Directional signs are certainly one of them. The average visitor to any of our cities must, with the help of a city map and other directional signs, navigate himself about with little fuss as pertains in all truly gateway countries. If we do not properly label our country, we may succeed in bringing some investors into the country alright, but the difficulty they will face in moving about here due to the lack of proper signs may make Ghana anything but a gateway to any destination.

Directional signs are vital for the smooth movement of both locals and visitors and all efforts must be made to ensure that they are where they ought to be and people know how to use them properly. From the way things are going in this country, it may not require a prophet to predict that soon, stopping strangers to ask for directions would be deemed a nuisance.

Writer’s e-mail: aamakai@hotmail.com