An Open Letter To The President Of The Republic Of Ghana

Your Excellency,
Every rainy season, Accra drowns. Homes fill with water. Businesses lose stock. Roads become rivers. Lives are lost. And every year, after the flood recedes, the same explanations recede with it — until the next downpour proves, again, that nothing structural has changed. I write this open letter not to repeat the grief of the last flood, but to place before Your Excellency a concrete proposal: Accra needs at least two new Odaw River-type drainage channels, and the city needs a sanitation regime that actually enforces itself.

The Problem Is Not Only Rainfall

Accra floods because it rains, but rain is not the whole story. It floods because the drains that should carry that rain to the sea are choked — by concrete debris contractors leave behind after construction, by waste dumped from shops and kiosks built along drain reserves, by plastic bags dropped indiscriminately across the city, and by connecting gutters blocked through careless construction work. This is not weather. It is neglect, and it has an address.

It has an address in the contractors who pour concrete near open drains and walk away without clearing the residue. It has an address in the shop owners who build along waterways and treat the drain beside their stall as a rubbish pit. It has an address, most seriously, in the consultants and District Assembly engineers who are paid to supervise this work and sign off on it regardless. When supervision becomes a formality rather than a function, every blocked gutter downstream is a signature away from being prevented.

Why Accra Needs Two New Major Drains

The Odaw River drainage system was built for an Accra that no longer exists. The city has grown far beyond what it was designed to carry, and patch repairs to an outdated network will not solve a problem of this scale. Accra needs new arterial drainage — built for the city as it is today, not as it was decades ago.

I propose two new Odaw River-type channels:

1. A north-western channel running from Amasaman through Ofankor, Ablekuma, Anyaa/Mallam, and Dansoman, and out to the sea — serving the fast-growing north-western corridor that currently has no major drainage outlet of this kind.
2. A north-eastern channel running from Dodowa through the Shai Hills area, New Ablekuma, Ashaiman, and Teshie, and into the sea — serving the eastern corridor, which floods just as severely and just as predictably every year.

Both routes pass through the areas that flood hardest and most often. Both would give stormwater a real path to the sea instead of the streets and living rooms it currently finds instead.

What Must Accompany the Engineering

New drains alone will not fix a culture of neglect. I respectfully submit the following measures to accompany the construction:

First, the malpractices described above — debris dumping by contractors, encroachment and waste disposal by shop owners along drains, and negligent supervision by consultants and engineers — must be identified and corrected as a matter of policy, not left to individual district discretion.

Second, all small and secondary drains across the city should be covered. Open gutters at the community level are where plastic waste enters the system in the first place; covering them removes both the blockage point and the safety hazard they pose to pedestrians.

Third, the city needs a standing corps of sweepers and cleaners engaged specifically for the rainy season, paid hourly or daily as the season demands, to keep drains and streets clear before the rains arrive rather than after they have already flooded. This should be funded through sanitation levies collected digitally from house owners and shop owners — digital collection to ensure the money reaches its purpose rather than disappearing between the point of collection and the point of use.

Fourth, enforcement must have teeth. Contractors who leave debris in or near drains, and consultants or engineers who certify substandard work, should face real sanctions — from blacklisting on future public contracts to prosecution where negligence has contributed directly to flood damage or loss of life. Supervision without consequence is not supervision.

Fifth, this cannot be a government-alone effort. Community-level sanitation task forces, backed by sustained public education on why drains are blocked and what it costs the city, would help shift the behaviour of ordinary residents and small businesses whose daily habits — a dropped plastic bag, a swept pile of construction sand — accumulate into the floods we all then blame on the rain.

A Matter of Will, Not Resources Alone

Ghana has built major infrastructure before. What this problem requires most is not a new technical capability but sustained political will — the will to fund drainage as seriously as roads, to enforce sanitation levies transparently, and to hold contractors and public engineers accountable in a way that has, for too long, not happened.

Every year we delay is another rainy season of preventable loss. I respectfully urge Your Excellency to place the construction of these two drainage corridors, alongside the enforcement and sanitation measures above, on the national agenda — not as a response to the next flood, but as the reason there is no next flood to respond to.

Respectfully submitted,
Rexford Adjei Darko
Public Relations Practitioner, Governance & AI Advocate and CSR Researcher

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