Features
When the rains come…
• Rains cause havoc in Accra every year
I live on Osabiede Street, a flood prone area of Mataheko in Accra. This area used to have a seven-year cycle of flooding. The first I experienced was on June 20, 2002. The second was June 19, 2009. I was preparing for the next one in June 2016 when June 3 happened in 2015.
Osabiede, or Kaneshie, is just one of the numerous flood prone areas of the capital and other places in this country. We all remember the fire that came with the flood at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle that took scores of lives, including my landlord’s grandnephew who found himself at Circle by default. It took us all by surprise.
Then we were told there was the need for a storm drain in front of the Accra Academy Senior High School that would solve the perennial flooding of the highway christened Dr. Busia Highway. When I visited the construction site I knew what was done was not a storm drain. I am told when President Akufo-Addo went to inaugurate the project he was mad at what he saw.
I am no engineer in hydrology, but common sense told me that would solve nothing. The next raining season saw the southern wall of Accra Academy come tumbling down. The asphalt on the stretch opposite the Kaneshie market folded up like a roll of linoleum. Osabiede Street was impassable and I could not move my car out of the driveway.
I went to the area office of the Department of Urban Roads where the Maintenance Engineer informed me that the roads in the general area of Central University had been given on contract and they would be fixed before the next rains set in. When I went to check I realised laterite had been spread on the street named after the celebrated musicologist, Dr. Ephraim Amu. Till date, the streets have remained undone and deteriorating.
I called the then Member of Parliament (MP) for the Ablekuma Central Constituency who told me it did not come under his remit. He forwarded the contact of the Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) to me because, according to him, the Assembly was responsible for such things.
When the MP lost in the 2020 elections I was not surprised since the constituency had a notorious reputation of making their MPs one-term office holders.
I agree it was not his job as MP, but I wondered if he could not lobby the Assembly on our behalf. I placed a call to the MCE who picked it on the second ring. It was a woman and she agreed to meet with me at her office on a date and time.
I was at the offices of the MCE ahead of time. She was four minutes ahead of the agreed time and quickly asked her Secretary after me. Madam Mariama Marley Amui was a very comely and motherly woman. She informed me that she was appointed to the job a month or so and was new to the terrain. After conferring with her administrator, one Tagoe was summoned to her office.
Tagoe said he knew the problem of my area too well but said he had to check if it was still under the jurisdiction of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) or if it was ceded to Ablekuma Central.
I asked him to give me his contact so I could check back on him. He declined and wanted mine so he could give me an update. Over four years on Tagoe has not been in touch and, knowing how public officers behave, I have not bothered to go back to the Assembly.
The Municipal Engineer, Justice Abdoni, drove in just as I was about to leave the premises. He told me in professional terms that our area needed a huge capital inflow to fix. It turned out that the engineer was right and I gave up on trying to go round offices talking to people who knew next to nothing about drains. I mean proper drains. He said a proper drainage was needed from the area near the GRA offices at Mataheko eastwards through the Abossey Okai area into the Korle, then into the Gulf of Guinea.
A couple of months before last year’s rains I was told some people had come to our area, marking spots for what they referred to as areas to consider for expansion of the drains to forestall further flooding. I later understood they were talking about the World Bank funding the project. Knowing that the World Bank would not give out money without ensuring it was expended properly I was a little relieved.
Nothing was done and the rains came to destroy the street the more. A young entrepreneur decided to make a stretch of the street motorable, in concrete, for his delivery trucks. After about 60 metres and over a few hundreds of thousands of cedis, someone showed up claiming he was the contractor chosen to do the drains and asked the young entrepreneur to discontinue his effort and save his money. He said he would commence work in September.
September came and went and we are in February. We have not seen or heard from the man claiming to be the contractor. The street remains unmotorable save the concrete stretch. In a couple of months the rains will come again and the cycle will continue one more time.
I have already asked my compatriots up north to make the perennial floods from the spillage of water from the two dams in Burkina Faso their election issue next year. We elect and appoint people to fix our problems yet the problems remain unsolved and, in some cases, get worsened. We have engineers who should foresee issues and advise policy makers but some are either in bed with the politicians or simply do not know their job.
Without having an engineering mind I can determine that a lack of legislation on how we build our homes and offices takes flooding into consideration. There must be a law that prohibits tiling compounds of homes so that the ground can soak some of the water.
The worst case scenario must be to allow pavement blocks not to take more than 20 per cent of the compound space. Home owners must be encouraged to grow grass in their compound.
Our technocrats must push our policy makers to do the needful in the interest of the people. Until a little over a decade ago, my birthplace of Koforidua knew no flooding. Almost every home in the Eastern Regional capital is now tiled, giving rainwater little chance of being absorbed into the soil thus opening the city to annual flooding anytime it rains.
Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies must make it mandatory for homeowners to build troughs to harvest rain water on their property. Many of our estate developers leave very little or no space for their grounds to take water. I wonder if common sense asks them where they think water will go whenever it rains.
Many natural disasters cannot be predicted, but measures we put in place have the potential of mitigating their devastating effects. This is what leadership is about. What happened in southeastern Turkiye and northwest Syria could not have been prevented but the number that died could have been averted if the homeowners had followed guidelines for building in earthquake zones.
How prepared are we since Accra is sitting on a tectonic plate or an earthquake fault line? Let’s not forget that the last very severe earthquake to hit Turkiye was in 1939, the very year Ghana had its most severe earthquake. Does this tell us anything? Is history about to repeat itself? We will see the dredging of our drains after the rains have started. This is our idea of preparedness.
The rainy season is not waiting for our politicians and their communicators to finish screaming at one another in the media space before it comes. Let them settle down to what Ghanaians voted for them to do. Meanwhile, how ready are our leaders when the rains come?
Writer’s email address:
akofa45@yahoo.com
By Dr. Akofa K. Segbefia
Features
Tears of Ghanaman, home and abroad
The typical native of Sikaman is by nature a hospitable creature, a social animal with a big heart, a soul full of the milk of earthly goodness, and a spirit too loving for its own comfort.
Ghanaman hosts a foreign pal and he spends a fortune to make him very happy and comfortable-good food, clean booze, excellent accommodation and a woman for the night.
Sometimes the pal leaves without saying a “thank you but Ghanaman is not offended. He’d host another idiot even more splendidly. His nature is warm, his spirit benevolent. That is the typical Ghanaian and no wonder that many African-Americans say, “If you haven’t visited Ghana. Then you’ve not come to Africa.
You can even enter the country without a passport and a visa and you’ll be welcomed with a pot of palm wine.
If Ghanaman wants to go abroad, especially to an European country or the United States, it is often after an ordeal.
He has to doze in a queue at dawn at the embassy for days and if he is lucky to get through to being interviewed, he is confronted by someone who claims he or she has the power of discerning truth from lie.
In short Ghanaman must undergo a lie-detector test and has to answer questions that are either nonsensical or have no relevance to the trip at hand. When Joseph Kwame Korkorti wanted a visa to an European country, the attache studied Korkorti’s nose for a while and pronounced judgment.
“The way I see you, you won’t return to Ghana if I allow you to go. Korkorti nearly dislocated her jaw; Kwasiasem akwaakwa. In any case what had Korkorti’s nose got to do with the trip?
If Ghanaman, after several attempts, manages to get the visa and lands in the whiteman’s land, he is seen as another monkey uptown, a new arrival of a degenerate ape coming to invade civilized society. He is sneered at, mocked at and avoided like a plague. Some landlords abroad will not hire their rooms to blacks because they feel their presence in itself is bad business.
When a Sikaman publisher landed overseas and was riding in a public bus, an urchin who had the impudence and notoriety of a dead cockroach told his colleagues he was sure the black man had a tail which he was hiding in his pair of trousers. He didn’t end there. He said he was in fact going to pull out the tail for everyone to see.
True to his word he went and put his hand into the backside of the bewildered publisher, intent on grabbing his imaginary tail and pulling it out. It took a lot of patience on the part of the publisher to avert murder. He practically pinned the white miscreant on the floor by the neck and only let go when others intervene. Next time too…
The way we treat our foreign guests in comparison with the way they treat us is polar contrasting-two disparate extremes, one totally incomparable to the other. They hound us for immigration papers, deport us for overstaying and skinheads either target homes to perpetrate mayhem or attack black immigrants to gratify their racial madness
When these same people come here we accept them even more hospitably than our own kin. They enter without visas, overstay, impregnate our women and run away.
About half of foreigners in this country do not have valid resident permits and was not a bother until recently when fire was put under the buttocks of the Immigration Service
In fact, until recently I never knew Sikaman had an Immigration Service. The problem is that although their staff look resplendent in their green outfit, you never really see them anywhere. You’d think they are hidden from the public eye.
The first time I saw a group of them walking somewhere, I nearly mistook them for some sixth-form going to the library. Their ladies are pretty though.
So after all, Sikaman has an Immigration Service which I hear is now alert 24 hours a day tracking down illegal aliens and making sure they bound the exit via Kotoka International. A pat on their shoulder.
I am glad the Interior Ministry has also realised that the country has been too slack about who goes out or comes into Sikaman.
Now the Ministry has warned foreigners not to take the country’s commitment to its obligations under the various conditions as a sign of weakness or a source for the abuse of her hospitality.
“Ghana will not tolerate any such abuse,” Nii Okaija Adamafio, the Interior Minister said, baring his teeth and twitching his little moustache. He was inaugurating the Ghana Refugee and Immigration Service Boards.
He said some foreigners come in as tourists, investors, consultants, skilled workers or refugees. Others come as ‘charlatans, adventurers or plain criminals. “
Yes, there are many criminals among them. Our courts have tried a good number of them for fraud and misconduct.
It is time we welcome only those who would come and invest or tour and go back peacefully and not those whose criminal intentions are well-hidden but get exposed in due course of time.
This article was first published on Saturday March 14, 1998
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Features
Decisions have consequences
In this world, it is always important to recognise that every action or decision taken, has consequences.
It can result in something good or bad, depending on the quality of the decision, that is, the factors that were taken into account in the decision making.
The problem with a bad decision is that, in some instances, there is no opportunity to correct the result even though you have regretted the decision, which resulted in the unpleasant outcome.
This is what a friend of mine refers to as having regretted an unregretable regret. After church last Sunday, I was watching a programme on TV and a young lady was sharing with the host, how a bad decision she took, had affected her life immensely and adversely.
She narrated how she met a Caucasian and she got married to him. The white man arranged for her to join him after the marriage and processes were initiated for her to join her husband in UK. It took a while for the requisite documentation to be procured and during this period, she took a decision that has haunted her till date.
According to her narration, she met a man, a Ghanaian, who she started dating, even though she was a married woman.
After a while her documents were ready and so she left to join her husband abroad without breaking off the unholy relationship with the man from Ghana.
After she got to UK, this man from Ghana, kept pressuring her to leave the white man and return to him in Ghana. The white man at some point became a bit suspicious and asked about who she has been talking on the phone with for long spells, and she lied to him that it was her cousin.
Then comes the shocker. After the man from Ghana had sweet talked her continuously for a while, she decided to leave her husband and return to Ghana after only three weeks abroad.
She said, she asked the guy to swear to her that he would take care of both her and her mother and the guy swore to take good care of her and her mother as well as rent a 3-bedroom flat for her. She then took the decision to leave her husband and return to Ghana.
She told her mum that she was returning to Ghana to marry the guy in Ghana. According to her, her mother vigorously disagreed with her decision and wept.
She further added that her mum told her brother and they told her that they were going to tell her husband about her intentions.
According to her, she threatened that if they called her husband to inform him, then she would commit suicide, an idea given to her by the boyfriend in Ghana.
Her mum and brother afraid of what she might do, agreed not to tell her husband. She then told her husband that she was returning to Ghana to attend her Grandmother’s funeral.
The husband could not understand why she wanted to go back to Ghana after only three weeks stay so she had to lie that in their tradition, grandchildren are required to be present when the grandmother dies and is to be buried.
She returned to Ghana; the flat turns into a chamber and hall accommodation, the promise to take care of her mother does not materialise and generally she ends up furnishing the accommodation herself. All the promises given her by her boyfriend, turned out to be just mere words.
A phone the husband gave her, she left behind in UK out of guilty conscience knowing she was never coming back to UK.
Through that phone and social media, the husband found out about his boyfriend and that was the end of her marriage.
Meanwhile, things have gone awry here in Ghana and she had regretted and at a point in her narration, was trying desperately to hold back tears. Decisions indeed have consequences.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT’
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