Graphic Editorial: Let’s act now to save lives

The incidence of flooding in Ghana has become a yearly ritual, especially in the city of Accra and other cities across the country.

Last Wednesday’s flooding of most parts of Accra is the worst to hit the country in recent times, leaving in its wake massive destruction and loss of lives.
While we agree that the rains will always come and that we need the rainwater for agricultural and other purposes, we believe that we have been annually plagued with floods because we have not been proactive in preventing them.
People are allowed to build on watercourses and nobody dare question them because they have the backing of so-called big men. Citizens throw any form of solid waste onto the streets and into drains with careless abandon and nobody dare challenge them.
We believe that our inability to insist on the right thing with regard to building and construction is largely to blame for the floods that have inundated us each year and claimed precious lives.

If we truly want to stop the yearly ritual of floods it behoves our technocrats and officials at state institutions mandated to enforce our building regulations and code to do their work without fear or favour.

Although the President has stated that “the situation of the convenience of the few which undermines the safety of the majority will not be tolerated”, we believe that this is the time to make all our laws on construction and adhering to basic hygiene and sanitation rules work. Let us do more action and less talk.

In the past, the Sanitary Inspectors of the Environmental Health and Sanitation Directorate, otherwise known as ‘Tankasi’, were revered and feared by all because they could not be ‘bought’ by any individual or group of people, as they fearlessly discharged their duties.
We need to do away with practices that simply encourage corruption and promote haphazard layout of our cities, such as the cumbersome acquisition of building permits that takes forever.

We believe that an outright refusal when one seeks to embark on a project in an unsuitable area and an emphatic ‘yes’ when they are at the right places would effectively do away with the situation where many put up buildings at the wrong places, before officials and state agencies cry wolf and feel morally weak to pull them down, citing humanitarian reasons.
The practice where city authorities mark buildings ‘Stop work, produce permit’, an euphemism for the green light to avoid harassment, must stop.

The question to ask is how come we see these red signs on buildings but the structures never get demolished and the owners are allowed to proceed.
Let us move away from this lack of transparency in the discharge of functions by state officials to an apt proactive way of overseeing developments in our cities. This will definitely stem the tide on the yearly ritual of floods.