President John Mahama
It is a fact that the floods which hit Accra were avoidable even as government spin doctors tried hard to make it look like a force majeure, destined to happen.
We have also witnessed attempts at making it look like being an act of nature, as it also affected Cote d’Ivoire. Such infantile spins should not be attempted under the circumstances because it only adds to the pain being endured by the many traumatised victims.
Even more irritating are the efforts at telling Ghanaians that this is not a subject to be politicised. At the time then opposition leader John Mahama politicised it in 2024, did he not realise the importance of depolicitising certain subjects such as flooding?
When a subject such as the construction of infrastructure or even cracking the whip when that is the best option when impunity prevails, there is no way this subject can be depoliticised because the negligence or misplaced priority originates from the political leadership headed by the President. Herein lies the politics of the subject.
When a government abandons the principle of continuum leaving in its wake stalled projects such as the Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development (GARID) project, the most audacious engineering response yet to the nagging perennial flooding in Accra, politicisation cannot be ruled out in a conversation.
One of our respectable academics is reported to have taken a swipe at the successive governments in the country since independence. According to him, they have all failed the citizens while taking a look at the recent flooding.
While we respect his stance, we wish to state that there is a massive difference between the two dominant political parties in the country when it comes to development.
While the New Patriotic Party (NPP) is credited with the World Bank’s certification of the Free Senior High School (SHS) policy as the most outstanding government social intervention in post-independence Ghana, we cannot point at a single recognition for the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the past decade.
The digitised space now operative in Ghana coupled with the mobile money interoperability for financial transactions among other projects stands out the NPP government in a rule of the tape consideration.
It is instructive that the NDC government has decided not to proceed with the GARID as it did others initiated by the NPP government, the most outstanding being the Agenda 111 project which saw the construction of multitude of hospitals across the country. The expected health revolution has been stalled by the NDC’s refusal to proceed with the project. The project was intended to lead to a massive reduction of the pressure on referral and other regional facilities in the country.
The foregone are but a few worth touching observations for the purpose of the occasional conversation as to whether or not the two dominant political parties are same in terms of delivery of lasting service to the people of this country.
The World Bank report about over $200 million not disbursed for the purpose of addressing the flooding in Accra speaks volumes about the recklessness of the incumbent government.
The aforementioned amount is part of the World Bank accessed funds for the actualisation of the GARID project initiated under the NPP administration.