Demolish illegal structures to curb flooding – Works and Housing Chair to Gov’t

Following the devastating floods that submerged parts of Accra on Sunday, May 18, the Chairman of Parliament’s Works and Housing Committee, Vincent Oppong Asamoah, has called on the government to take bold action by demolishing structures built on unauthorized lands.

The heavy rainfall, which lasted nearly three hours from around 3:00 p.m., rendered roads impassable and left several communities, including Weija, Kaneshie, Adabraka, Adenta-Dodowa, and Tema, underwater.

The Odaw drain, which is Accra’s key stormwater channel, overflowed, exacerbating the situation.

The National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) described the incident as the worst flooding the capital has experienced in the past five years.

Speaking on Morning Starr with Naa Dedei Tettey, Mr. Asamoah attributed the flooding to widespread indiscipline, including unauthorized construction and poor waste management.

Mr. Asamoah emphasized the importance of enforcing municipal bylaws to curb indiscriminate dumping of waste into drains and the unregulated paving of land, which prevents rainwater from being absorbed into the ground.

He urged authorities to adopt alternative solutions suitable for the local context and begin by clearing waterways to prevent further flooding.

Mr. Asamoah stated, “Indiscipline all over the place, people building where they are not supposed to build and we don’t have the courage to pull down structures and I think whilst we have new MMDCEs they have to start to put effort to stop lot of waste into our drains even though government on his part are dissolving some but they keep on dumping waste into our drains and all this is I think it comes back to enforcement of our bylaws in the country. So let those in power at the moment, the current government, and if appointees, let’s start to enforce our laws. I know most of these places we are paving almost everywhere we build and then we pave we have to leave lawns so that while it rains some of these water can also get place to rest and then be absorbed but once we are paving everywhere, we are building roads everywhere, there’s this danger of flooding all over the place.”

He added, “I know we don’t have an underground drainage system where you go to other jurisdictions, even though it rains, it floods, but the next morning you go and everything is cleared because they have a good underground drainage system, do we have it in Ghana? No, we don’t. So there should be other methods that we will use to solve this flooding in other parts of the country. First, I recommend that we clear the waterways first, and we can only do that by demolishing structures that have been built at unauthorized places, just demolish them to give a passage.”