Awakening Call To All Ghanaians –June 3rd Disaster (Who Is To Be Blame?)

Everyone has a responsibility to his or her country in one way or the other. However, how such responsibilities and duties are carried out by the citizens will determine the prospects and challenges of that country. The attitude of citizens is one of the key determiners of the level of development of that country. If the citizens think state properties belongs to them and must be taken care of no matter the situation, then the country is likely to have a positive development.

Also if citizens sees state properties as the states and not theirs, the vice versa occurs. Such attitude makes the difference between Malaysia and Ghana, which gained independent within the same period (1957). Yet Ghana has a lot of natural resources like minerals, agricultural products including cash crops and even oil. What is the problem?

So what happened in June 3^rd, 2015 is just a physical manifestation of our accumulative actions as Ghanaians. Poor drainage was not the root cause of the problem; it is just one of the symptoms, which means as a country we are not solving the problem but addressing a symptom of it. For God sake, 159 people lost their lives leaving behind orphans, widows and widowers and childless parents. Others lost their friends and siblings and about 70 people received injuries. What caused this disaster?

The main cause is poor attitude of Ghanaians towards their duties and responsibilities. The ordinary citizen throws rubbish into drainage channels without regrets, developers only cares about the benefits they will get from various physical development projects (residential, commercial, civic and culture, industrial, etc.), the consequence of the location does not matter even if not given a permit. Should development activities take place without development permit?

The answer is no, but people develop without permits and the Town and Country Planning Department which is supposed to control development activities in space to achieve safety is there, are they compromising their responsibilities or authorized by politicians who is part of the activities of the department to do things against their will? Are our politicians delivering accordingly or doing things to favour certain group and themselves? As citizens do we expect cash /kind from politicians during election period? If so, what kind of leadership will we get out of that, for people invest to gain.

To prevent something worse than June, 3^rd, 2015 disaster from happening again, every Ghanaian should have a sense of duty to the country. The song of “we`ness” should outweigh that of me. Waste should be sent to places it belong and not in drainage channels (gutters and water bodies). Developers should go for development permit and make sure they take any advice given to them by the authorities.

Ghana Water Company and Electricity Company of Ghana should not render services to any developer without development permit. Planning authorities should be given the mandate to do their responsibilities without much political interference and also to make the permit process easy and faster for developers. Politicians should be responsible to citizens and treat every government department as important and necessary as breathing. Therefore citizens, developers, planning authorities, city engineers, utility companies and politicians should work together to make June 3^rd disaster the last and worst nightmare in Ghana.