Friday

LEKMA: Rasta Floods - A tale of Daniel Amartey Mensah’s I told you so

Much as I sympathize with people whose houses were flooded leading to loss of valuables running into thousands of Ghana cedis,  I cannot but cast my mind back to few years ago when Daniel Amartey Mensah was the Municipal Chief Executive of the Ledzokuku-Krowor Municipal Assembly and what will be going through his mind.


Once upon a time, Mr. Daniel Amartey Mensah, the former MCE of LEKMA led a team to demolish all houses along the Kpeshie Lagoon to make space for running water from the other communities to collect especially when the Kpeshie over flows it banks.
 
Basically, his argument was that the land around the Kpeshie Lagoon should be left to accommodate spill over from the lagoon so as to avert any serious disaster to lives and properties.
 
His action was met with strong opposition but he carried out the exercise. To make things better, after the massive demolishing, the drains to the lagoon were all dredged to allow more water to flow through it because it was obvious disaster will occur when the municipality experienced heavy down pour.
 
Unfortunately, his action did not go down well with many people especially property owners who suffered the heavy losses as a result of the demolishing. And I am sure he, and for that matter the 
 Assembly might have suffered some legal challenges as a result of that action.
 
Today, the very locality he tried to protect for nature to have its free flow when it wishes is filled with houses with very little space for even human beings to walk through. 
 
Typical of Ghanaians, people built their houses at the edge of the lagoon without any expert engineering work to reinforce their walls and houses.
 
Then came the infamous long hours of heavy downpour and no one reminded the people of the reality of the situation they were in. Houses were flooded some submerged completely. So people will have to start their lives from the scratch because they lost all their properties.
 
I think this is another case of a lost battle against uncontrolled development. So once again the powers that be have failed us. I am sure if what he started was sustained new developments would not have sprung up in the area.
 
June is very young and has already given us a tip of what it can do even at this age. What then happens when it decides to give us more rains as predicted by the Meteorological service? Where will all these people be finding refuge? 
We live to see.
 

No comments:

Post a Comment