Ohene-Akoto Rejects Flood Excuses, Demands Urban Reform
Ghana can no longer attribute recurrent inundation to seasonal precipitation, Ing. Justice Ohene-Akoto has asserted, as structural deficiencies continue to exact a devastating toll on communities and infrastructure. The Executive Director of the Association of Science and Engineering Consultants, ASEC, contends that chronic flooding is a product of human design failures rather than meteorological inevitability. His intervention arrives as urban authorities confront the cumulative impact of systemic planning deficits across the nation’s major cities.
“Poor drainage, building in waterways, improper waste disposal, and weak enforcement are challenges we can solve. The time to act is now,” Ohene-Akoto declared, framing the crisis as a governance imperative rather than an environmental anomaly. He argued that the persistence of flood-related dislocation reflects a collective failure to enforce planning codes, regulate land use, and maintain critical hydraulic infrastructure. According to ASEC’s engineering assessment, remedial interventions must prioritize hydraulic efficiency, watershed integrity, and municipal accountability.
The engineering body identifies four interlocking pathologies undermining urban resilience. First, undersized and silt-choked drainage networks cannot convey peak runoff, resulting in overbank flow during intense storms. Second, unregulated construction within riparian corridors and natural floodplains has eliminated retention capacity essential for attenuation. Third, indiscriminate solid waste disposal obstructs conduits and exacerbates backflow. Fourth, lax regulatory enforcement has normalized violations without consequence, eroding the deterrent effect of statutes designed to safeguard public safety.
Contextually, Ghana’s urbanization trajectory has outpaced the expansion and modernization of drainage systems, leaving legacy infrastructure overwhelmed by densification and climate variability. The conversion of wetlands for residential and commercial purposes has further diminished the landscape’s natural buffering function. Ohene-Akoto maintains that rectifying these conditions requires coordinated action across metropolitan assemblies, environmental regulators, and law enforcement institutions, with an emphasis on preventative planning over reactive remediation.
The policy prescription centers on immediate enforcement, infrastructural retrofitting, and behavioral change. ASEC advocates for the demolition of structures encroaching on watercourses, comprehensive desilting and expansion of drainage, strict prosecution of illegal dumping, and the digitization of development permitting to enhance compliance monitoring. Ohene-Akoto insists that the fiscal and human cost of inaction now exceeds the capital outlay required for systemic reform, positioning urban drainage as a matter of economic security and social equity.
Failure to act will perpetuate a cycle of displacement, property loss, and public health risk that undermines national development objectives. The Executive Director’s admonition crystallizes a broader demand for institutional resolve: to replace resignation with regulation and rhetoric with reconstruction.
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*Source:* ASEC
*Author:* Korkor Anumu
