Keta Flood 2021 on my mind

First, two pertinent quotations:

“The unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.” - Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

And

From my intellectual mentor, Robert Ingersoll: “In nature, there’s neither reward nor punishment, only consequences.”

It is sad to watch as our people are subjected to another anguish of serious flooding.

Even before the dramatic changes in global climate, we have been victims of perennial flooding, many of them have resulted in loss of lives. We appear to be the only specie of the human race that continue to live at the vagaries of nature - we perish in both drought and floods!

In an article I wrote for my defunct column in The Daily Dispatch in 2014 titled, “Perennial Flooding and the lamentations of presidents,” I wrote, among others: “No honest analyst will look at us in Africa today and not conclude that something is seriously wrong with us.

What do we do in Ghana after flood destroyed properties and livess?

Nothing.

We make no plan whatever; we only continue to hope that natural accidents will spare us if we pray hard enough.

Like a bad script written by an idiot, we see the president come with all protocol, pontificate loudly, and receive wild ovations. He goes back to his office and forget all about it. Of course, his fawning entourage will make a show of doing something. The cameras are switched off. Everyone forgets about it. After all, the rains has stop.

Wayward and totally amoral chiefs will sell land earmarked for waterways. Their machomen will ensure that developers build where they are not supposed to. Our police officers will collect their bribes and look the other way, and allow miscreants to flout our laws. City officials will also collect their own envelopes, and ensure that they see less than they usually see. Citizens who complain are lambasted as troublemakers, beaten up and occasionally killed.

In the meantime, the rest of us, like the good Ghanaian citizens we are, will continue to throw garbage anywhere and everywhere.

After all, our country’s motto is: Freedom and Justice.

We are constitutionally-licensed to do anything, especially the most irrational and society-degrading things.

They forget to add Responsibility to our motto, to make us know that freedom without responsibilities leads only to chaos and anarchy.

We continue to use our drains for garbage dumps. We block drains, built at great expense, with our household refuse, and they become choked.

City and Town planning officials will receive their paychecks, drink akpeteshi in their offices, play lotto, gossip the whole day and do nothing.

The Mayor of Accra would rather take his populous beard to go and direct traffic than sit down and formulate policies necessaries to run a modern city.

President and his Ministers meet in their Cabinet, and come out with more appeals for prayers and fasting for the nation.

Our presidents feels more comfortable parlaying with parasitical priests than with city engineers or architects.

Rains come, and we die needlessly. We cry loudly and appeal for government intervention. We roll on the ground in supplication to goblins of the sky, and shamelessly appeal for foreign assistance.

Oh, we love to grovel and appeal for interventional assistance. The Agency we set up to deal with emergency, the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO), is ill-equipped and badly-funded to deal with any emergency. Its head was in the news this week telling us that his outfit lack even a single tent.

Go figure!

When do we develop some sense of shame and start to behave like normal human beings?

When, when, when??… You can read the full article here: http://alaye.biz/perennial-flood-and-the-lamentations-of-presidents/

I am not from Keta, but a trip I made to the town about five years ago revealed to me a most neglected ancient town. Most of the town, including the Chief’s palace, was under water. The Fort Prinzenstein which, if properly maintained, should be a money spinner is in terrible state of disrepair. I was sufficiently concerned to chronicle it here: http://alaye.biz/videos/help-save-the-fort-prinzenstein/

We cannot continue to bury our heads in heaps of sand, eat our fufu, wash it down with choice liquor and pretend that all is well with us.

We can’t keep on closing all our senses to the gargantuan mess engulfing us and hope that it will somehow vamoose on its own accord.

Do we need the Oracles to divine for us that we will suffer great calamities of flooding when we choke our gutters and continue to live our wayward lifestyles?

What exactly did we expect to happen when we weaned and sold the sand the ocean deposited to protect us against the ravages of the seas?

Of course, asking hard-boiled questions is not our forte; we prefer to whine and lament when we become casualties of our own misbehaviors.

Fẹmi Akọmọlafẹ is a writer and author

November 9, 2021