Former Minority Chief Whip and Member of Parliament for Asawase, Mohammed Muntaka Mubarak, has urged the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA) to engage protesting tricycle operators and revise its ban against the use of tricycles in the Kumasi central business district.
The KMA on July 25 began enforcing the ban against tricycle usage in the central business district, which it said was hindering business activities in the area.
The enforcement was intensified on August 1, leading to the arrest of some defiant operators and a scuffle between the police and angry operators, some of whose tricycles were seized.
Speaking on Eyewitness News on Citi FM, Muntaka urged the KMA to engage with the agitating operators, as the ongoing scuffle between city authorities and the angry operators is likely to affect peace and security in the area.
“What you are saying is that you don’t want them to work because when you say don’t come into the inner city, where will they get passengers?”
“When you have a teaming population that does not really have formal jobs, we need to be careful because these are the people engaged in this [tricycle] business, and so we should ask ourselves, assuming we stop that business, what will be the alternative and so let us not let people feel more hopeless because the more people we make feel hopeless, the likelihood we will have uprisings which we may not want.”
He described the number of youths who poured onto the streets of Kumasi on Wednesday to protest the ban as “scary,” and said it must be handled with care so as not to incur harmful outcomes.
“What I saw on Wednesday morning, nothing is scarier than that because there was massive traffic as almost every major street in the area was blocked as a result of the tricycle operators’ protests and so I will advise the city authorities to meet them halfway because there are good guys among them who are using this business to take care of themselves and their families.”
