Every year, the rains come. Every year, homes are submerged, roads disappear under water, businesses collapse, and lives are lost.
And every year we hear the same statement: "Buildings on watercourses must be demolished."
But before we pick up excavators and bulldozers, Ghana must ask itself a difficult question:
Do we make laws for human beings, or do we make human beings for laws?
This is not about promoting illegality.
It is about confronting institutional failures.
If a building stands on a watercourse today, how did it get there?
Buildings do not appear overnight.
Someone sold the land. Someone surveyed it. Someone prepared drawings.
Someone approved those drawings.
Someone issued permits. Someone inspected the construction.
Someone connected utilities. Someone collected property rates. Someone watched the structure rise block by block.
Years later, the same State returns and declares: "You have built illegally."
The truth is uncomfortable. In many cases, citizens are paying the price for failures that began within institutions.
The question is therefore not simply whether structures should be demolished.
The deeper question is: How did we allow them to be built in the first place?
Ghana does not flood because rain falls. Rain falls in Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, China and the Netherlands.
Yet these countries do not experience annual paralysis whenever clouds gather.
The difference is engineering, planning, leadership and foresight.
Water obeys physics.
It follows gravity, seeks the lowest point and remembers its natural pathways.
When we build on those pathways, water does not negotiate—it simply returns.
The flooding of Accra is therefore not primarily a rainfall problem.
It is an engineering, planning and governance problem.
Should we demolish everything?
The popular answer is yes.
The practical answer is more complicated.
Imagine demolishing every structure on every floodplain, drainage reserve, wetland and watercourse in Accra.
The financial cost would be enormous. Thousands of families would be displaced.
Businesses would collapse and social tensions would rise.
The question becomes: Can engineering provide solutions where demolition alone cannot?
The answer is yes.
Many countries have solved similar challenges through bold engineering interventions rather than relying solely on demolitions.
Ghana must begin thinking beyond emergency responses and annual desilting exercises.
Engineering revolution ignored
For decades, Ghana's flood response has focused on desilting drains, demolishing a few structures and distributing relief items after disasters.
These are maintenance activities.
They are not transformative solutions.
One overlooked technology is the chain trencher, a machine capable of excavating long, deep and continuous trenches rapidly.
These trenches can become infiltration corridors, groundwater recharge systems and stormwater diversion channels.
Large chain trenchers can cost between approximately US$100,000 and US$1 million, but their ability to redirect and absorb stormwater could fundamentally change flood management in Ghana.
Another innovation is the tree spade machine, which relocates mature trees instead of cutting them down during road and infrastructure projects.
Depending on size, these machines range from roughly US$20,000 to US$250,000.
Imagine a national programme where mature trees are relocated, urban forests expanded, and flood-prone areas transformed into green infiltration corridors.
Trees are not decorations.
They are hydrological infrastructure.
They intercept rainfall, improve infiltration and reduce run-off.
Biggest failure, institutional
Even the best engineering solution will fail if institutions fail. Ghana must ask difficult questions: Who approved developments in flood-prone areas?
Who ignored stop-work notices?
Who watched wetlands disappear?
Who allowed drains to become dumping grounds?
Who looked away while watercourses were occupied?
Floodwater is often the physical manifestation of decades of administrative negligence.
Water exposes weaknesses that reports and speeches cannot hide.
Costs doing nothing
Every year Ghana spends billions on emergency relief, road repairs, bridge reconstruction, compensation, health care and lost productivity.
Imagine if even a fraction of those resources had been invested consistently in flood tunnels, smart drainage systems, wetland restoration, infiltration corridors and flood intelligence systems.
We would be discussing resilience rather than recurring disasters.
Hard truth
The issue is bigger than drains, demolitions or politics.
It is about whether we are willing to redesign our relationship with water.
Engineering teaches a simple lesson: Water does not obey plans.
Water obeys physics.
The nations that succeed are not those that fight water.
They are those who understand it, accommodate it and engineer around it.
Until Ghana embraces that philosophy, the rains will continue to expose our weaknesses.
And every year, when the floods come, the water will ask us the same question: "You knew where I would pass.
Why did you build there?"
And perhaps an even harder one: "If the building should never have been there, why did you allow it to be built?"
The writer is a PhD student, UMaT,
Lecturer, Faculty of Engineering,
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
Ghana Communication Technology University.
