Each rainy season has the same scenes: streets that are flooded, vehicles that are underwater, shops that have been destroyed, and families wading through brown water that has eaten up their homes.
And each year the same excuses are given. From the clogged gutters to the indiscriminate dumping of waste and inadequate drainage, we are aware of the causes and have known them for years.
Therefore, the real issue is not what is leading to the floods but why, from year to year, we fail to put right the problem. Given the pattern of promises kept, delays, and half-hearted actions that have been evident over just the last twelve months, I do not think that Ghana will be ready when the rains come back in June.
We have an Attitudinal Problem that we unfortunately refuse to punish properly.
The way NADMO communicates to the public clearly sets out the main point: although throwing waste into the gutters might seem harmless at the time, it ends up blocking water channels, leads to flooding, and puts people’s lives in danger, which is why they are asking members of the public to report such offenders directly to their headquarters through WhatsApp.
The government has admitted as much. In an interview on Citi Eyewitness News, a representative of NADMO, Dennis Ajanor, stated that “when rubbish is dumped into drains during the rainy season, it ends up blocking the culverts further down the line, causing water to find its own way into people’s houses, and emphasized that this is essentially an attitude problem.
The fact that the cause has been identified hasn’t led to any real changes in people’s behaviour. In 2019, a landlady was fined GHS 2,400 after tenants had been caught on film dumping their rubbish into run-off water while it was raining, having admitted to violating the Public Health Act. More recently, a man who was caught littering was forced to remove rubbish from a gutter with his bare hands. These are the two measures we currently have available: a fine or a single day of public shame. Neither of them is sufficient to overcome a habit that affects whole neighbourhoods.
Elsewhere, deterrence unfortunately looks more impressive. If Ghana really wants to change this attitude, the punishments imposed on offenders should involve a real period of time and not merely financial penalties or just one afternoon. Those who are caught repeatedly dumping waste into drains or into public areas should not merely pay and then be done with it. Instead, the courts should be able to require them to carry out a real term of supervised community service, which should include cleaning the very drains and public areas that their actions have harmed, together with a fine.
The idea is not radical since it is already in operation in other places. Under Singapore’s Corrective Work Order (CWO) system, people who repeatedly litter are required to physically clean public areas for between three and twelve hours while wearing a special vest.
This is intentionally designed, the National Environment Agency of Singapore says, so that the offenders will realise the burden that cleaners have to bear each day. On average, Singapore issued about 27,200 littering fines per year between 2017 and 2021, and during that period around 10,200 CWOs were handed out.
As recently as this year, there were four people who were foreign nationals, and they were given a full four-hour shift involving street sweeping and clearing drains, which is the longest session allowed by law in a single day.
Other nations are also working on the same approach. In India, Chandigarh now requires people who break its rules about solid waste disposal to do community sanitation work rather than having to pay heavy fines, thus turning the punishment into a form of public involvement.
While in the United States, New Hampshire law gives the courts the authority to make convicted litterers clean up the area where they dumped the waste. Although none of these systems require several months of hard work, they all manage to make the punishment match the crime in a way that a fine alone is incapable of doing.
Stronger enforcement only applies to waste that will be produced in the future; it does not affect the huge amounts of plastic and debris that are already in our drains and waterways at the present time.
In order to deal with this, other countries have resorted to physical infrastructure such as trash traps and interceptors which are situated upstream to catch floating waste before it gets into major waterways.
Vietnam has fitted a number of these along the Song Hong (Red River) with the aim of preventing plastic from ever reaching the sea. The Netherlands employs floating barriers in its canals and ports and then reuses the collected litter as building materials and for floating parks.
Singapore takes it a step further by fitting its drainage system with concealed underground collection nets that pick up the waste during heavy rain. And that’s even before it has a chance to become a visible issue. Ghana, on the other hand, has not done so, and therefore our drains will continue to become clogged no matter how strict our littering laws become.
However, there is a valid issue arising from all of this: why should ordinary people be the ones to bear the full weight of waste management when it is the companies that originally produce and gain a profit from plastic?
This issue has a specific name: Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), and it refers to a policy approach which makes producers responsible for what happens to their packaging after it has been sold, covering its collection, recovery, and recycling.
Over 70 countries have implemented some version of EPR, with Europe being the most developed area, with about 40 to 45 countries adopting it. The first such law was Germany’s Packaging Ordinance of 1991, which was introduced because the amount of packaging waste was overwhelming the country’s landfills.
Japan then enacted its own Container and Packaging Recycling Law in 1997, which required producers to fund recycling and to submit annual reports, with actual penalties for failing to comply.
Ghana is not unfamiliar with this concept since the EPA states that the implementation actually started under Act 917 and L.I. 2250 as far back as 2016. Yet a decade on, Agbogbloshie is still one of the biggest e-waste sites in the world, a fact which shows clearly how limited the early system has been in practice.
It has certainly been a whole decade of “Coming Weeks,” and unfortunately, it is here that the pattern of delay ceases to be overlooked. In October 2025, Larry Kotoe of the EPA stated that stakeholder engagement would restart “in the coming weeks” for the legal process for a wider EPR framework that encompasses plastics, glass, metals, textiles and electronics and was aimed at being completed by the first half of 2026.
Yet by April 2026 the Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation was still referring to the bill as being at the stage of stakeholder consultation, a director affirming that the draft would have to be sent to the Attorney-General before it could even start the process of becoming law. In short, by the very date which had been promised, the process was not near an end.
By August 2026, the situation had not changed, and the issue was still evolving under discussion. The EPA had announced its intention to formally include informal waste collectors in the system, and a new federation of associations of informal waste workers had been set up in order to take on a role in Ghana’s circular economy.
These were certainly useful developments. Yet it has now been ten years since the policy was first committed to, and it is still being ‘worked on’. If a policy of such importance can drift on for so long, then what basis do people have for believing that it will be finalized before the next rainy season arrives?
The fact is that “Ghana has not only an indiscipline problem but also an infrastructure problem.”Ama Yeboaa Ayi Dako-Seidu said in one of her “BigAfricanDevelopment” videos on TikTok. “It has both of them,” And the problem is that focusing on only one will never do.
“Proper infrastructure makes it easier for people to do the right thing, while effective enforcement makes it more costly for them to do the wrong thing,” she said. At the moment, we lack both: there are no trash traps in our drains, the fines are too weak to alter people’s behaviour, and a producer-responsibility law which has been ‘almost ready’ since before some of the current litterers were born.
So are the Ghanaians prepared for the rainy season next year? No, not at the moment. Not so long as a ten-year-old policy is still just a draft, not so long as littering has no real consequence other than a fine, and not so long as the drains which will cause our streets to flood in June are the same ones that are already being filled with plastic today.
The laws do exist in writing; however, the lack is rather a determination to enforce them. As long as we don’t eliminate that gap between promise and action, we can look forward to having this identical conversation again the following year, standing in the same floodwater and asking the same questions.
