Stop Playing Politics With Corpses: Accra’s Floods Are a National Crisis, Not a Party Scorecard

The bodies had barely been recovered from the floodwaters when the press releases started arriving.

On June 29, 2026, as emergency workers waded through submerged streets in Alajo, Kaneshie, Darkuman and Weija, as families climbed onto rooftops and rescue boats navigated what had once been roads, Ghana’s two dominant political parties were already at their keyboards. The New Patriotic Party issued a statement blaming the National Democratic Congress. The NDC administration pointed to rainfall data and climate change. Each side performed its ritual of sympathy for the victims and contempt for the other. And somewhere in the floodwaters, the dead were still being counted.

This is Ghana’s most shameful flood season tradition not the flooding itself, but the politics that surrounds it. The scramble to assign blame. The competition to claim credit. The Wellington boots and the cameras and the bags of rice. The press releases that arrive faster than the rescue boats.

It must stop. Accra’s flooding is not a partisan issue. It is a national emergency that has been failing Ghanaians across every government, every party, every term, for nearly a century. And the politics being played around it is not merely undignified. It is actively preventing the solutions the city desperately needs.

The NPP’s Statement and the Mirror It Should Have Held Up

On June 29, the NPP issued a press release that was, in political terms, textbook opposition. It expressed sympathy. It listed the affected communities. It accused the NDC administration of failing to implement effective flood control measures. It described the floods as a recurring ‘June 3rd moment.’ It alleged that anti-flood interventions announced by the government had been abandoned or poorly executed, and that the Ministry of Finance had deliberately delayed the release of critical funding. It called on President Mahama to ‘stop redirecting blame to citizens and take personal responsibility.’

Every single one of those criticisms deserves to be examined. The fragmentation of flood management responsibility across multiple ministries is a genuine governance problem. The gap between announced flood interventions and their execution is real. The slow release of mitigation funds, if true, is indefensible. The NPP is correct that Ghanaians are tired of being told that flooding is a ‘shared responsibility’ every time the rains come.

But here is what the NPP press release did not say: that Accra flooded repeatedly and catastrophically during eight years of NPP governance. That the June 3, 2015 disaster the worst flood in Accra’s modern history, which killed more than 200 people in the combined flood and explosion at Kwame Nkrumah Circle occurred under a John Mahama NDC administration, yes, but that it was followed by the floods of 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2022 and 2023, several of which fell entirely within NPP tenure. The same communities Kaneshie, Odawna, Adabraka, Alajo, Weija, Circle and parts of the Odaw River basin were repeatedly among the worst affected across both parties’ administrations.

The NPP’s statement did not mention that comprehensive drainage and infrastructure plans developed and documented as far back as 2017 during NPP governance were never implemented. It did not mention that the NDPC Chairman, Dr Thompson, revealed he personally attempted to report illegal encroachment on waterways to a Municipal Chief Executive and a sector minister and was met with foot-dragging and bureaucratic leaks. Those local assemblies had legally compromised spatial planning and building regulations, allowing unauthorized developers to build directly inside waterways and critical wetlands.

The NPP press release against the NDC reads convincingly until you hold it up to a mirror. The reflection looks exactly the same.

The NDC’s Inheritance and Its Responsibilities

The NDC administration is not without its own legitimate grievances. Seventeen months is not enough time to reverse nine decades of accumulated neglect. The structural drivers of Accra’s flooding the destroyed wetlands, the buildings on floodplains, the choked drainage channels, the colonial-era infrastructure never upgraded for a city of four million people were inherited, not created, by the Mahama government in January 2025.

And the rainfall data is genuinely significant. Approximately 140 millimeters of rain fell on Accra on June 29, 2026, compared to the highest single-day rainfall of about 56 millimeters the previous year. That is an event of a magnitude that would test any city’s infrastructure, regardless of how well maintained. Climate change is making extreme rainfall events more frequent and more intense across coastal West Africa, and no political party can legislate that away.

But the NDC also cannot escape accountability for what was within its control in the seventeen months it has governed. If flood mitigation funds have been delayed for cosmetic budgetary reasons that is a choice. If the comprehensive drainage plans developed in 2017 remained unimplemented as of June 2026 after both parties had the opportunity to act that is a shared failure. And President Mahama’s statement at a London diaspora town hall in May 2026 that flooding in Accra is ‘not an engineering problem’ but ‘a problem of indiscipline’ was not just politically unwise. It was analytically wrong, and it handed the NPP a gift they did not deserve.

Godwin Mahama Ayaba, Government Spokesperson and Corporate Affairs Officer at TOR, said what few in either party have been willing to say publicly: ‘It is unfair for political actors to blame only one government. Both the NDC and NPP have governed the country at different times but have not solved the challenge. If all of us had done the right thing, we would not still be dealing with these flooding challenges today.’

That is the honest statement. It is also the politically inconvenient one.

The Credit Game: Wellington Boots and Bags of Rice

There is a second dimension to the politics of Accra flooding that is, if anything, more cynical than the blame game. It is the credit game.

Every flood season brings politicians into the water. Not to fix the drains. To be photographed standing in them. Wellington boots are the essential accessory. Bags of rice and tins of cooking oil are the props. The cameras roll. The statements of solidarity are delivered. The affected communities receive temporary relief that addresses none of the structural causes of their recurring devastation.

As one Ghanaian commentator put it: ‘Politicians love flood season. Wellington boots on, bags of rice, oil, tinned goods, cameras rolling. We feel your pain. Africans deserve cities that work, not just handouts after disaster. Ghanaians deserve more than relief parcels.’

This performance has a specific political economy. Emergency relief food aid, temporary shelter, cash support to affected households is visible, immediate and photographable. It generates goodwill in affected communities ahead of the next election cycle. It demonstrates responsiveness. It does none of the things that would actually prevent the next flood: dredging the Odaw River, removing structures built on waterways, upgrading drainage infrastructure, enforcing building codes, prosecuting officials who accept bribes to approve construction on wetlands.

The GH₵300 million announced by President Mahama after the June 29 floods split equally between emergency relief and flood mitigation is welcome. The relief allocation will help displaced families in the short term. But Ghana has announced flood relief packages and mitigation programmes after every major flood event for at least twenty years. The mitigation allocations consistently disappear into institutional processes that produce little visible result. The same communities flood again. The same announcements are made. The cycle continues.

What the Experts Are Saying That the Politicians Are Ignoring

The voices that matter most in this debate are not the party spokespersons. They are the engineers, planners and researchers who have been documenting Accra’s flood crisis for decades and whose recommendations have been consistently set aside for political convenience.

The NDPC Chairman has warned that Greater Accra, which occupies just 1.4 per cent of Ghana’s total land area while generating 38 per cent of the country’s GDP and attracting roughly 86 per cent of all foreign direct investment, has become a victim of its own economic dominance. This immense spatial concentration creates a perfect storm where rapid, concrete-heavy urban growth severely outpaces the city’s drainage capacity.

The President of the Ghana Institution of Engineers has stated that the country has been doing things the wrong way for over thirty to forty years. Urban planning experts have described Accra’s physical planning regime as non-existent in practice. Developers build in waterways because enforcement is weak to the point of irrelevance and because, as the NDPC Chairman revealed, officials who attempt to enforce regulations are met with foot-dragging and pressure from above.

Recent engineering assessments have found that existing drainage systems in many Ghanaian cities were designed for historical rainfall patterns and are no longer adequate to manage contemporary stormwater volumes. The World Bank committed US$150 million in additional financing under the Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development (GARID) Project to improve flood management for more than 2.5 million people living within the Odaw River Basin. That financing is available. The plans exist. What is missing is not money or knowledge. What is missing is sustained political will that outlasts election cycles and survives the transition from one party to the other.

A National Issue Demanding a National Framework

The argument of this column is not that governments should not be held accountable for their flood response. They must be. Accountability is the foundation of democratic governance. The NDC must answer for every announcement it has made about flood mitigation and failed to implement. The NPP must answer for every year of its eight years in power during which the flood map expanded, the drainage infrastructure aged and the Odaw River continued to choke.

But accountability must be focused on substance, not spectacle. On outcomes, not press releases. On the long-term structural investments that actually prevent floods, not the short-term relief packages that make for better photographs.

What Accra needs is a bipartisan national framework for flood management one that commits both parties, regardless of which one is in government, to the same multi-decade investment plan. One that removes flood infrastructure from the political budget cycle. One that establishes an independent flood management authority with real enforcement powers and real accountability mechanisms. One that mandates the disclosure, year on year, of what mitigation funds were released, what projects were executed, and what results were achieved.

Ghana has the engineering knowledge. It has the urban planning frameworks. It has, when international financing is available, the money. What it has consistently lacked is the political culture that treats flood management as a long-term national responsibility rather than a seasonal opportunity for partisan point-scoring.

Conclusion: The Dead Deserve Better

At least twelve people died in the Accra floods of June 29, 2026. Their names have not been read into the parliamentary record. No national day of mourning has been declared. They were poor people, mostly, living in the communities that always flood first and are always forgotten last. They died not because of exceptional rainfall alone though the rainfall was exceptional but because of decisions made and deferred across decades, across parties, across governments that promised to fix the problem and moved on.

The NPP and the NDC will continue to contest the 2028 elections. They will make promises about flooding. They will arrive in Wellington boots. They will distribute rice. They will issue press releases.

The Odaw River will continue to choke. The wetlands will continue to be sold. The illegal structures on waterways will continue to be built. And when the rains come, Accra will continue to drown.

Unless Ghana decides collectively, across party lines, as a national matter of survival that the politics of flooding must end and the work of flood prevention must begin.

The dead deserve that much. The living deserves it more.

Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.
International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP
mustysallama@gmail.com
+233-555-275-880

Sources
MyJoyOnline Stop Fiddling With Anti-Flood Interventions, NPP Slams Government, June 29, 2026: https://www.myjoyonline.com/stop-fiddling-with-anti-flood-interventions-npp-slams-government/

Adom Online NPP Blames Government for Recurring Floods, June 29, 2026: https://www.adomonline.com/npp-blames-government-for-recurring-floods-demands-urgent-action/

Sikaman Times NPP Questions Government’s Anti-Flood Coordination, June 29, 2026: https://sikamantimes.com/npp-questions-govts-anti-flood-coordination/

GBC Ghana Online Accra Floods: NDC, NPP Have Both Failed, Godwin Mahama Ayaba, June 9, 2026: https://www.gbcghanaonline.com/general/accra-floods-ndc-npp-have-both-failed-godwin-mahama-ayaba/2026/

GBC Ghana Online Institutional Failures in MMDAs Driving Accra Floods, NDPC Chair: https://www.gbcghanaonline.com/general/institutional-failures-in-mmdas-driving-accra-floods-ndpc-chair/2026/

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ModernGhana Ghana’s Capital Drowning Again: The Citizens Are Mad, The Leaders Are Drunk, June 2026:https://www.modernghana.com/news/1506652/ghanas-capital-drowning-again-the-citizens-are.html

Africa.com Ghana’s Capital Accra Submerged as Floods Expose Long-running Urban Drainage Crisis, June 2026: https://www.africa.com/global-south-world/ghanas-capital-accra-submerged-as-floods-expose-long-running-urban-drainage-crisis

ViewGhana Accra Floods 2026: What Really Happened: https://viewghana.com/accra-floods-2026-what-really-happened-which-areas-were-affected-and-what-visitors-should-know/

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