The Strife Is O’er, The Battle Not Done

I will not hasten to join in the song of triumph if it has begun. I know the real strife has just begun: the battle for real leadership to ensure we, the people of Ghana, will not go through the devastation that we just went through again.

The initial utterances from our leaders after the devastation were not very reassuring: from former President Rawlings saying he wished he had a bulldozer to President Mahama saying it is time to do something about building in the waterways and news reports saying that demolition of homes on waterways has begun at Legon area. They sounded to me like knee jerk reactions which were not well thought through and at best were only lip service at a time when the world was looking.

Solution for our flood problem has long eluded our leaders I believe because it is not something that they think about. When there is a flood, they feel sorry for the victims and then quickly forget there was ever a flood until the next time.

First of all, we have land surveyors in Ghana. We may need more of them but that is not an impossible task. There are many people who hang out doing nothing. These people don’t need to know much about surveying to be trained to be rod men. Solution to the flooding starts with surveying.

Surveying the land will make it a lot easier to identify local areas where we can construct storm water retention ponds. Along with the retention ponds, we need many local storm water detention ponds to quickly detain storm water and slowly release it into the retention ponds.

Along with construction of retention ponds, we need to look seriously at the capacity of the channels that we have to carry storm water to the bodies of water where they will eventually wind up. I see the gutters along Ring Road in Accra as nothing more than glorified swale. They technically have no capacity. They had little capacity years ago and are woefully inadequate because of continuous building of impervious surfaces without giving thought to how the waters are going to get anywhere. I am talking a problem many, many years in the making.

One concern in increasing the capacity of the gutters may be elevation. There may be places where digging deeper and wider gutters may not be so easy because of slope and the elevation of the destination. That makes an argument for underground pipes. Elliptical reinforced concrete pipes can replace the gutters we have and be built where the current gutters are with greater capacity, and maybe have them go under the road. Putting pipes under roads are often preferable elsewhere because at repair time, you often stay within an existing right of way.

How are we going to pay for this? We just got IMF loan that many people already suspect is going to end up at the places where such money often end up such that only few people benefit and not the nation, right? How about at a time like this we make the necessary sacrifices and the necessary arrangements to divert some of the money to help address the problem.

Ponds were built when there were no machinery to build them. Pure man power did the work. We have more than our share of strong young men who don’t have jobs. I have heard stories of college graduates in Russia who go to Siberia to do hard work and make some good money and come back to their towns and cities after they have saved a good sum of money. When the US needed contractors instead of soldiers to go to Iraq, they paid good money to attract the labor. Truck drivers were making more money than they ever dreamed they would make. At our rate, even the great pay may not measure up to world market rates. Can’t we pay our young guys good money to work three or four days a week digging ponds if we can’t have bulldozers and back hoes dig them?

I will hate to hear the same song when the rains come around next year. If our leaders feel the pain the nation felt in recent days, this is the time to show it; and hopefully by this time next year we can all join in and sing, “The strife is o’ver, the battle done” or maybe the battle half way done.

Tony Pobee-Mensah [email protected]