Where Is The Anti-Flood Committee?

The June 3, 2015 killer and property-destroying floods which visited Accra were commemorated two days ago.

It was a commemoration bereft of an elaborate and coordinated programme of reflection under the auspices of government but rather occasional and isolated references in media conversations.

The thoughts on June 3, 2015 as afore-referenced were occasioned by the near repeat of the disaster as recorded on the night of June 3, 2026, a date associated with fire and water, so eerie and true.

It went down in post-independence history as the worst force majeure having claimed 150 lives and pushing many to the precipice.

The heated discussions which followed the tragedy of eleven years ago presupposed an unimpeded action by government to address the perennial flooding of Accra. It was all hot air it turned out, nothing happened.  Eleven years have elapsed since that date and another June 3 has dawned on us, and there is tragedy albeit not on the scale of the June 3, 2015 incident but enough to push us to seek answers to questions about sincerity of governments in tackling the immediate infrastructural concerns of the nation.

We saw earlier attempts at addressing the perennial floods, the most audacious being the Greater Accra Urban Resilience and Integrated Development Project (GARID), a World Bank funded project to address challenges such as stemming the perennial flooding of Accra.

With more rains forecast, the worst in the past thirty years according to the Meteorological Services Authority, the days ahead could be ominous.

We are simply not prepared and have all along played lip-service to a perennial weather challenge in a global era of climate change.

And it came to pass that last year, in March, as the main raining season beckoned, the President set up a seven-member anti-flood taskforce to tackle the annual Accra headache.

He settled on his Deputy Chief of Staff in charge of Operations at the Presidency, Stanislav Xoese Dogbe as Chairman of the body. The high-profile committee made up of Mr. Kenneth Gilbert Adjei, Minister for Water Resources, Works and Housing; Mr. Ahmed Ibrahim, Minister for Local Government, Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs; Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCOP) Abdul Osman Razak, National Security Coordinator; Mr. Teddy Addi, Deputy Director-General of the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO); and Madam Marietta Brew Appiah-Oppong, Legal Counsel to the President and Secretary to the taskforce, presented a promising picture for the victims of the annual rituals of flooding in the nation’s capital.

No sooner had the committee been empaneled than the membership, courtesy of the Chopper Squadron of the Ghana Air Force, took to the air on a so-called recce patrol of Accra.

The exercise smacked seriousness on the part of government to deal with the annual floods head-on.

With the involvement of the 48 Engineer Regiment of the Ghana Army on standby to render the covering support, there was no doubt that something seismic was going to happen. Ghanaians can give their verdict as to whether the committee has lived up to expectation or not considering the consistency of the deluges and more to come.

They went to sleep soon after touchdown at the Air Force base, leaving Accra to continue the annual rituals of floods followed by the President’s unproductive blame-game.