Bad Politics Got Us This Low

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
June 6, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

Rev.-Dr. Kwabena Opuni-Frimpong's call for the country's leaders not to play politics with the flood disaster and the gas-station explosion that cost the lives of some 200 Ghanaians in Central-Accra on Wednesday, June 3, 2015, is worth giving serious thought to (See "Don't Play Politics With Flood Disaster - Christian Council" Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/6/15). But I am also wondering how often such calls have been issued by the country's major religious leaders over at least the past decade.

The irony of the entire scandalous affair is that our religious leaders have been blase, or platitudinous, like our politicians; which is why this clearly preventable tragedy strikingly mirrors the cyclical Kafkaesque inaction and ineptitude of both our political and religious leaders. To be certain, I read the press statement issued by Rev. Opuni-Frimpong, a Presbyterian Church of Ghana clergyman who also serves as the current General-Secretary of the Christian Council of Ghana, with amused ambivalence because in the recent past Dr. Opuni-Frimpong has made trenchant political statements that diametrically contradicted what he is reported to be counseling vis-a-vis Wednesday's tragedy.

One such statement which vividly sticks in my mind and craw was about how Ghanaians were supposed to have literally lapsed into mental and psychological coma in the wake of the auspicious overthrow of the Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party (CPP). I wouldn't be surprised if Dr. Opuni-Frimpong happens to have been one of the legions of hapless Young Pioneer Cub Scouts indoctrinated to envisage Kwame Nkrumah as the nonesuch divinely ordained messiah of Ghana. I also remember firing off a rejoinder to this vacuously propagandistic assessment of the indisputably extortionate regime of the CPP. But what even more significantly bears highlighting here is that in 1959, or just two years into Ghana's postcolonial existence, a flood of similar dimension to what occurred last Wednesday struck the country.

And so rather than waxing pontifical about the need not to play politics with Wednesday's flood, I would rather have Rev. Opuni-Frimpong inform Ghanaians about the precise measures taken by President Nkrumah and his cabinet to effectively and permanently resolve this problem. I am very certain that the learned cleric would be hard put coming up with a single Nkrumah initiative in this direction, besides the equally disastrous resettlement of citizens displaced by the artificial flooding of the Volta River Basin, caused by the construction of the Akosombo Dam. Well, I must quickly point out that during the two-and-half years that Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia's Progress Party (PP) government ruled the country, the Oxbridge-educated thinker built a whole new township for the resettlement of the people of Akyem-Nsutam.

The erudite sociologist and rural-development expert may well have taken his cue on Nsutam from Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, but there is also ample evidence pointing to the fact that when it came to the question, or subject, of rural development, Dr. Busia was ages ahead of President Nkrumah. I decided to raise the latter question because a major part of the annual flooding of our country's major cities has quite a lot to do with the abject neglect of rural development, which has led to inordinate urban congestion and the concomittant lack of constructive residential planning. We also know for a fact that it was the criminal lack of will on the part of successive governments, in strictly enforcing our building codes, that led to the unnecessary deaths of some 200-plus Ghanaian citizens drowned by the most recent floods.

Indeed, every year, for as long as anybody can remember, scores of Ghanaians have perished through lack of proper policy planning and execution. On Thursday, while touring the flood-ravaged areas of Accra, President John Dramani Mahama sheepishly complained that the unhealthy politics with which flood-preventive demolitions of illegally constructed homes and other structures had been met in the recent past, was to blame for the latest tragedy. Mr. Mahama therefore pledged to adopt a more tough-minded attitude towards this human-made environmental hazard. We wish him all the best and godspeed in this direction.

Unlike the Christian Council's Dr. Opuni-Frimpong, I don't see how any savvy Ghanaian politician of either major party could attempt to score "cheap political points" with Wednesday's tragedy. What I really want to see is the various stakeholders of civil society, including the leadership of the Christian Council of Ghana, among all the other recognized religious bodies in the country, conferring with our politicians to draw up a comprehensive plan for a long-term solution to this problem of floods. And on the latter note, it ought to be promptly highlighted the fact that the entire nation of Ghana is flood-prone.

Indeed, if I were Mr. Mahama, I would invite architects and civil engineers from Holland, or the Netherlands, who have the most reliable expertise in this crucial area of national development, to help with the drastic melioration of this recurrent national headache.

___________________________________________________________