Street hawking on the carriageway is prohibited under Ghana’s road traffic law, recently strengthened by the Road Traffic (Amendment) Act, 2025 (Act 1153) and the new Road Traffic Regulations (L.I. 2519). Yet on Friday 14 August 2026, footage from Lapaz showed the N1 highway in Accra functioning as an open market. The pattern is national.
Towns migrate onto the bypasses built to free them. Purpose-built market stalls stand empty while their occupants trade on the road. Government is now building 24-Hour Economy markets across the country. The stalls are not the problem. The buying habit is. Ghanaians shop where the traffic is, and traders follow the buyers onto the road. Unless enforcement, market design and civic behaviour are tackled together, the new markets will repeat the Kejetia experience: financed, commissioned and bypassed. This article sets out the causes and the remedies.
- The Scene at Lapaz
On Friday 14 August 2026, the civic advocacy platform Civic Sense GH published a video of the N1 highway at Lapaz in Accra. Racks of clothing stood on the carriageway. Heaps of shoes and sandals covered the road surface. Mannequins lined the kerb. Suitcases, basins and bedding occupied the shoulder and spilled into live lanes. Pedestrians threaded between moving vehicles. Trotros loaded passengers in traffic. A zebra crossing had become a display floor.
The N1 was built to motorway standard to move traffic swiftly through Accra. At Lapaz it now moves at walking pace, because it has become a market. The caption on the video appealed to the President to direct the Okaikwei North Municipal Assembly to clear the traders and restore sanity. A plea to the Presidency should never be necessary for a duty that sits squarely with a municipal assembly. That it was made at all tells us how completely local enforcement has collapsed.
- What the Law Says
The law is not the gap. The Road Traffic Act, 2004 (Act 683) has governed conduct on our roads for over two decades. Parliament strengthened it in December 2025 through the Road Traffic (Amendment) Act (Act 1153), and the new Road Traffic Regulations (L.I. 2519) prohibit hawking on the roadway. Assembly bye laws across the country say the same thing. The Local Governance Act gives every assembly the power, and the duty, to control the use of streets and public spaces within its jurisdiction.
The safety case is written in blood. The National Road Safety Authority’s provisional figures record 2,949 deaths in 14,743 crashes in 2025, the worst toll in thirty-five years and an increase of over eighteen per cent in 2024. Pedestrian knockdowns rose year on year. A road that doubles as a market is a crash site waiting for its victims. Every trader seated on the carriageway, and every buyer leaning through a car window, is one distracted driver away from becoming a statistic.
- How a Highway Becomes a Market
The pattern repeats across the country. The state builds a bypass to free a town from through traffic. Within a few years the town migrates to the bypass, because the traffic is where the money is. Settlement follows the road, trade follows the settlement, and the highway is slowly strangled by the very activity it was built to escape.
I see it in my own town. Aiyinasi in the Ellembelle District has a market. Most of its stalls have been vacated. On market days, Tuesdays and Fridays, the traders sell instead on the roadside along the trunk road, blocking the carriageway and forcing through traffic to crawl. The stalls stand empty a few hundred metres away. This is not a story about poverty or lack of infrastructure. The infrastructure exists. It is a story about where the buyers are, and the buyers are in the vehicles on the road.
- The Kejetia Lesson
Kumasi offers the clearest warning. Kejetia is a gigantic modern market complex of several storeys, built at great public cost. Yet most of the selling happens on the ground floor and in the streets surrounding it. The upper floors trade thinly. The surrounding roads are jammed with traders and buyers, and it can take close to two hours to negotiate the traffic around the market. A world-class facility sits at the centre of the congestion it was built to cure.
The lesson is simple. Infrastructure does not change behaviour by itself. Build a market without moving the trade into it, and you have built a monument, not a market.
- The 24-Hour Economy Question
Government is currently building 24-Hour Economy markets across the country. I support the policy. Modern, well-serviced markets are a sound public investment. But an honest question must be asked before the ribbons are cut: who is going to shop in them?
The Ghanaian shopping habit is roadside convenience. We buy from the car window in traffic. We buy on the walk home, at the trotro stop, at the junction. Even pedestrian footbridges stand unused while people cross six lanes at grade, because the bridge adds two minutes to the journey. A buyer who will not climb a footbridge to save his own life will not climb three floors of a market to buy tomatoes. If the habit is not confronted, the new markets will not trade, and the roads outside them will.
- Why Enforcement Fails
Four failures keep the trade on the road. Assemblies collect daily tolls and fees from the very hawkers they are supposed to remove. A receipt issued for an illegal pitch legitimises the pitch, and the revenue creates a quiet interest in the status quo. Decongestion exercises are episodic. Task forces sweep a corridor for the cameras and the traders return within days, because the exercise was an event and not a policy.
The political cost is real. Hawkers are voters and evictions photograph badly, so enforcement softens as elections approach. And responsibility is scattered. The police MTTD, the NRSA, the assemblies, Urban Roads and the Ghana Highway Authority each hold a piece of the problem, and no single officer answers for the state of any given corridor.
- What Must Be Done
The remedies follow from the causes. Every new 24-Hour Economy market should be commissioned only with a binding relocation and enforcement plan, so that no facility opens until the surrounding roads are cleared and a named authority is accountable for keeping them clear. Roadway clearance should become a published performance condition for Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives, with quarterly compliance reporting corridor by corridor. The NRSA should use its compliance notice powers against assemblies that permit trading on classified roads.
Assemblies must stop collecting tolls from roadway traders. Revenue should be earned inside the markets, through fair rents and good services, so that the assembly’s financial interest points into the market rather than onto the road. Design must meet behaviour halfway: lay-bys and off-street trading precincts at trotro stops, market frontages facing service lanes rather than the carriageway, and secure, well-lit pedestrian routes into the markets. Prosecution under the new law must be sustained and even-handed, reaching the buyer in the roadway as well as the seller. And civic education must return in earnest, because the NRSA itself has linked the 2025 fatality surge partly to the suspension of sustained public campaigns.
- Conclusion
Ghana does not lack law, and soon it will not lack markets. What it lacks is the will to make the two meet. The N1 at Lapaz, the roadside at Aiyinasi on a Tuesday, and the streets around Kejetia are the same picture taken in three places. A country that cannot keep its motorways from becoming markets will get no value from the markets it builds. The tools are on the table. The authorities must pick them up, and keep holding them long after the cameras have gone.
Written by Nana Annor Amihere II
- The writer is a Health, Safety and Environment professional, Immediate Past National President of the Ghana Institute of Safety and Environmental Professionals, Founder of the African Institute of Safety and Environmental Professionals, and a member of the National Road Safety Authority Technical Working Group
