Perennial Accra floodings: De-concentrate the capital city- Lecturer

A Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Planning at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Dr. Stephen Takyi, has observed that the perennial flooding in the capital city of Ghana, Accra is as a result of congestion in the city and called for a system that will de-concentrate the capital city.

Speaking on OTEC FM’s morning Nyansapo show, Dr. Takyi on  June 22, 2018 said interventions by city authorities will not work because Accra is overpopulated with all the head offices of the state institutions located there, mentioning the Passport Office, COCOBUD, GNPC among others and suggested that those institutions be spread across the ten regions in Ghana.

According to the Lecturer who is also expert in planning, due to huge human and vehicular traffic, it makes the city engineers very difficult to plan and re-engineer the city to accommodate overwhelming population in the city.

He stressed that until government implements the decentralization policy, the city will continue to be flooded because it is perceived that Accra is only city for a successful place to do business.

‘’Congestion of the network is both economically inefficient in terms of the cost in billions of cedis to businesses in service provision and environmentally unacceptable because of pollution, severance and noise and the effect on the health and wellbeing of the public’’, he observed.

‘’I therefore suggest that, until the government implement the decentralization policy to spread all the headquarters of the state institutions across the country, this problem will continue to repeat itself, because it baffles me why cocoa board headquarters is located in Accra while we don’t grow cocoa in the capital city” Dr. Takyi told the programme’s host Captain Koda.

The lecturer further said after the 2016 disaster he conducted a research to know why Accra got flooded any time it rained and found out that, Accra gets flooded because of very poor drainage system.

“Most of the drainages are too small to contain the rain water, making flooding easy whenever it rained” Dr. Takyi added.

The lecturer again pointed out that most residents of Accra have built houses in the flood prone and waterlogged areas. This he noted also contributed to the frequent flooding in the capital city.

Source: Ghana/otecfmghana.com/Nana Asare Barimah