I am an angry, demoralized Ghanaian and you should be too.
The rains came, garbage and cars and people floated down our streets and we wailed!
Predictably, the President declared a National Clean-up exercise and piles of garbage have been dug from gutters-, waiting to be returned to the drains by future rains.
Comically, the leaders of Zoomlion have cynically assigned 2,000 people to help in the clean-up.
A member of the government that should have had policies in place to prevent the choking of drains and garbage floating in our streets has walked into a bank to berate a bank for doing its business instead of doing clean-up.
The President described the need to do better. There was no report of a national rainstorms/drainage plans-, no new budget, no accountability measures like dismissals for dereliction.
I am old enough to remember Rawlings’ clean-ups that led nowhere.
Sadly, it seems that barring a miracle, in a few years, after we have all moved on, the rains will come again, people will die, property will be destroyed and the cycle will repeat.
This country and this President are no strangers to rains and deaths. In 2014, there were rains, followed by deaths–some from cholera and these same noises were made, to no effect.
According to the World Bank, sanitation problems cost about 290 million USD or about 1.6% of our GDP annually. That does not count the malaria, cholera, etc and their toll.
Furthermore, 1 in 5 Ghanaians practice open defecation and only 25% have access to good sanitation.
That is in normal times and during these normal times, we generate garbage that we have no policy for disposing of.
We build, with the connivance of the government tasked with protecting us, in drainage plains, valleys and when it rains, there is wahala!
We need to ask ourselves some hard questions. What is our sanitation budget? Is it adequate? What is our sanitation National Sanitation policy? More people died in Central Regio than Accra.
When shall we join enlightened nations in converting waste to energy? When are we going to see MMDCEs and Ministers fired in response to some of these disasters for incompetence?
When shall we link galamsey’s growth to the deadliness of floods and attack it like a health issue? When shall we have a law requiring residences to be insured so that we can mitigate the effects of these disasters?
When shall we bring back “Tankase”? When shall we see sanitation as a source good, well-paying jobs? Here in the US and elsewhere, the 2014 rains would have led to hearings followed by the emplacement of policies.
Why doesn’t that happen in Ghana? How did Parliament permit the NADAA government which had pledged to make Accra the cleanest city in Africa to cut its sanitation budget by nearly 60% from 2023 to 2024?
A nation that regularly tolerates such preventable devastation while permitting scarce national resources to be used in funding pilgrimages and Cathedrals is not serious. Ghana deserves better. Let’s be up and doing.
May God strengthen our leaders so they can protect us and help us to resist incompetent leadership.
