Strictly enforce by-laws on building to deal with flooding - IET-Ghana charges MMDAs

The President of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET-Ghana), Wonder Davor, has charged metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) to strictly enforce building regulations in their localities in order to avoid the indiscriminate siting of structures in areas such as waterways.

The move, he said, was to help deal with the perennial flooding and the subsequent destruction of property and the loss of lives during the rainy season in parts of the country.

Mr Davor told the Daily Graphic in an interaction in Accra that by-laws must be enforced to the letter to ensure orderliness in line with the layout and local plans of the various communities.

Concern

He expressed concern about the level of flooding in the capital city and in other parts of the country, adding that it was the collective responsibility of all to ensure that the problem became a thing of the past.

"Assemblies should go ahead and enforce the by-laws on development control as part of measures to deal with flooding in our country," he said.

The laws, he said, had clearly been spelt out and that Section 117, subsection 2 of the Land Use and Spatial Planning Act 2016 (Act 925), for instance, stated that “a person who carries out any physical development without permit commits an offence and is liable on summary conviction to a fine not less than 500 penalty units and not more than 1,000 penalty units or to a term of imprisonment of not less than two years and not more than four years or both".

Imprisonment

"So you can go to prison for four years, and you can also pay 500 to 1,000 penalty units, or you can be surcharged, or you can be fined both for building without a permit," he explained.

Mr Davor observed that in most parts of the country currently, development had gone ahead of planning schemes, and that was not supposed to be the case.

He indicated that because the people were developing ahead of the planning schemes of the assemblies, they built haphazardly, and sometimes they blocked waterways and most of the time even filled river courses.

That, he said, was what was happening mostly in rural areas.

He said developers would buy land from chiefs and then start developing without respect for the plan of the area.

Mr Davor advised developers to wait for their permits before starting their projects to save them money from demolition and flooding when it rained.

"Because the law says that if you don't have a written permission given in the form of a permit by the assembly to you, do not start any project. Don't even use a pickaxe to strike the ground when you are doing excavation," he said.

"In the Land Use and Spatial Planning Act 925, 2016, it said the same thing. Local Government Act 936, 2016, also says the same thing. Building Regulation, LI 2465, 2022, also says the same thing. If you don't have building permits from the assembly in the form of a written document, you don't have the right to strike the ground to start any excavation.

Even now, for the Land Use and Spatial Planning Act 2016, it is even made criminal, where you can even be sentenced," he said. 

He advised citizens to stop throwing rubbish into drains and dumping waste indiscriminately, ensuring that gutters did not become choked and overflow during the rainy season.

GARID Project

He charged the government to ensure that all the projects being undertaken under the Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development (GARID) were fast-tracked and completed to pave the way for the smooth flow of run-off water to avoid flooding.

Mr Davor said those that had been abandoned must be terminated and re-awarded for their speedy completion.

"To the government, it should relook at the contracts, especially under GARID.

Those that are going on and those that are on suspension or “those that the contractors have abandoned site should be terminated and re-awarded to various contractors willing and ready to complete them," he said.

Moreover, Mr Davor said the construction of a detention pond to hold water from the Aburi Hills and other places would go a long way to minimise the flooding of the capital when it rained.

The design, he said, had been done, and what was left was possibly the funding for the project to take off.