Filth Swamps Ghana Capital in Floods as Regular as Rains

Every year in June the floods come.

Rokia Gedle has lived for 23 years in a blue wooden shack without a bathroom or kitchen in Ghana’s capital, Accra. She has raised six children there. She can’t remember not having her home flooded in the rainy season.

“This year was the worst,” said Gedle, a 54-year-old shopkeeper who lost her fridge, TV, cash and clothes to floods last week. “I didn’t realize the water was still going up, up, up until my eldest daughter said we should run outside.”

The hardest hit neighborhoods, including Gedle’s, are still choked with filth left by the city’s overflowing drains and gutters a week after floods killed more than 200 people. Ghana’s failure to improve public sanitation limits growth by 1.6 percentage point, according to the World Bank, in an economy set to expand at the slowest pace in 20 years.

Flooding is an annual problem for the capital, where 4 million residents are packed into a space originally planned for roughly half a million people. Donor-sponsored plans to clean the polluted drainage network and organize efficient garbage collection, some dating back to the 1990s, haven’t made any headway.

“Despite initiatives taken by the local government in recent years to improve drainage, Accra is not well-prepared to deal with heavy rains at all,” said Joe Melara, a former program manager at an urban project in Accra financed by New York-based Columbia University.

Deputy Information Minister Felix Kwakye Ofosu said he couldn’t immediately comment.

Open Gutters

Accra is the only capital in West Africa where most roads are lined by open drains and gutters. Plastic rubbish clogs the gutters. Drains are choked with sand and used as toilets. The sewer system reaches less than 10 percent of the population, according to the World Bank. Garbage is dumped on the streets.

Cash-strapped municipal authorities are in charge of waste management and cleaning out drains. Health Minister Alex Segbefia warned that the floods could trigger a fresh cholera outbreak after last year’s, the worst in two decades.

The city needs a master plan against flooding that looks at different long-term scenarios, Jochem Schut, an Accra-based Dutch engineer, said by phone.

“Water needs space,” said Schut, who is completing the design of two drains planned in the outskirts of Accra. “Like in most African cities, there’s been so much construction that water can’t even sink into the ground anymore. There are a lot of paved surfaces.”

Stalled Plans

It’s not yet clear when money to build the drains will be released from a fund run by the Dutch and Ghanaian governments, Schut said.

Donors have regularly encouraged Accra to modernize its sewer system and expand the drainage network. The city government put on hold a $600 million project backed by the U.S. Export-Import Bank to protect residents against flooding last year. That halted the dredging of a lagoon serving as a drain for the city’s waste water, leaving hills of foul-smelling brown sludge on its banks.

The project was conceived by former President John Mills in the wake of a 2011 flood that killed more than 10 people. The government has declined to say why the project was put on hold.

‘Tough Measures’

President John Dramani Mahama said last week he will take “tough measures” to prevent a new disaster, pledging to destroy homes near waterways. Ghana has set aside 50 million cedis ($12 million) to deliver aid to flood victims.

Ghana will have to make “a conscious effort to change the overall planning culture” to protect residents against floods, Melara, who served as a program manager for the Millennium Cities Initiative in Accra until this year, said in an e-mail.

“The political will to innovate rather than react is key,” Melara said. “In the case of Accra, physical development has outpaced planning and municipal service provision, and that is what lies at the root of the problem.”

Standing in her bare wooden house after she had offered her only remaining plastic chair to a visitor, Rokia Gedle said she’s unlikely to move.

“If the government gives us a place to go to, I’ll go,” she said. “But we shall never get that.”

Source: Bloomberg.org

By: Pauline Bax

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