FRANCIS ASENSO-BOAKYE has assumed office as Works Minister, close to the onset of the raining season.
With the task of protecting the country, especially the nation’s capital, from the elements clearly on his bosom, he could not have been more put on his mettle.
His ability to confine the perennial destructive floods in Accra to the dark chapters of the annals of the city’s hydrological history would stand him apart from others before him.
He has hit the ground running, and it is our hope that he would walk his talk of ending the floods that have remained unenviable features of Accra over the years.
He must not let the talk follow the trail of those we have heard over the years, especially in the aftermath of destructive deluges.
During these times, victims are given assurances of the end of their annual predicaments in sight, through projects said to be in the pipeline. We recall especially Accra’s worst disaster in recent years, when a filling station near the Kwame Nkrumah Circle went up in flames during a deluge-triggered downpour. Government at the time promised to take remedial action, to obviate future recurrences. Since then, however, the floods have not abated; although none of them vying with the scale of the lives-claiming one that occurred near the Circle filling station.
Perhaps the new Works Minister is coming with a magic wand that would alter the feature of the raining season in Accra.
We encourage him to listen to the counsel of the experts, such as hydrologists, some of whom accompanied him a couple of days ago, to inspect among other projects, ongoing dredging works on the confluence of the Odaw-Onyasia rivers at Caprice, Kwame Nkrumah Circle, Upper and Lower Korle Lagoon.
If the minister wants to score high in the management of the city’s drainage, and for that matter halt the destructive fallout from the deluges, he must adopt a new template; previous ones have failed to yield the desired result.
Getting the MMDAs involved in tackling the perennial floods is an important move which the minister should consider.
Tackling floods in Accra is neither restricted to the Works Ministry nor to the MMDAs, but dependent upon the responsible attitude of residents of the city.
It is for this reason that addressing Accra’s perennial floods demands a multi-agency approach. The MMDAs, the police and the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) should join hands, of course, under the direction of the Works Ministry, to get rid of obstructive structures on waterways.
Successive governments have been unable to achieve this feat. Efforts towards ensuring sanity in private or individual constructions in Accra, are hardly carried through.
Structures which are earmarked for demolition because they stand in the way of streams as they head towards the Atlantic Ocean, escape the radar of the bulldozers. Partisan politics, when quickly blended with such important city management practices, exposes the nation’s capital to avoidable and destructive floods.
Even as we wish the new Works Minister Godspeed, we shall keep our eyes open on how the raining season vis-à-vis the incidence of floods pans out.