If you live in a country where development precedes planning there will always be chaos and flooding. That has been the sad story of Ghana, Randy Abbey a football administrator and host of Good morning Ghana show has said. “In the developed world, planning precedes development; in our part of the world, development precedes planning. Every time you have the developers taking the lead and then you have planners having to do the catch up” he stated on news analysis programme Newsfile, Saturday. He was discussing the perennial problem of flooding that has bedeviled the country for years. A rainstorm Monday, drowned many parts of the country and left at least six people dead including a young medical doctor. Aya Hayfron had her car washed away in a Teshie flood while she attempted driving through to her residence. She was trapped and her body found two days later by some local fishermen at the Kpeshie lagoon. That was after the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO), the military; police mounted a search for her after her husband made an SOS call to the institutions to help find her missing wife. Discussing the matter on Newsfile, the panelists showed some fatigue discussing a yearly national canker. Randy Abbey quoted portions of a Parliamentary hansard in June 1959 in which the parliamentarians then were discussing plans to desilt and dredge drains as a way of fighting the perennial flooding at the time. “Next year 2019 will be 60-years since this statement was made on the floor of Parliament. We are still here doing the same thing. We are still being told the same thing, desilting, dredging…” The TV show host argued dredging and desilting have been done for over 60-years but the country is always flooded anytime it rains. “The amount of money we spent on desilting and dredging is done every year but that is not the solution…It is waste of money,” he stated and charged the authorities to do the big things. “We have got a point where we need to prioritize; we cannot spread ourselves thing,” he stated. The Works and Housing minister Samuel Atta Akyea had suggested the flooding menace could be solved with an amount of $700 million but Randy Abbey said the budgetary allocation by the government does not show a government committed to solving the problem. Even if it will take five years, Mr Abbey would rather government commit to solving the matter once and for all. A member of the panel, Isaac Adongo who is also the MP for Bolgatanga says money is partly a problem but the major problem is the political will to solving it. Source: myjoyonline.com

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