The Minister for Works and Housing, Francis Asenso-Boakye has asked Ghanaians to be environmentally responsible in the discharge of waste to help reduce filth and curb the recurrent flooding during the rainy seasons.
He noted that the subculture of the individual of dumping household solid waste into open drains continue to have adverse effect on government’s efforts to improve communities’ resilience to flooding.
Mr. Asenso-Boakye thus believes the safety of communities especially those in flood-prone areas should be a shared responsibility, adding that citizens owe it a duty to support government’s effort in maintaining drainage capacity and reducing the likelihood of flooding.
By so doing, he observed ‘desisting from indiscriminate disposal of solid waste into drainage channels’ as the only way to avert the situation during periods of rainfall.
The Minister made these appeal while inspecting the ongoing dredging works at the downstream end of the Odaw Basin near Korle Lagoon in Accra on Thursday, March 17, 2022.
Whiles commending the country for its successes chalked in flood management programme, the Works and Housing Minister said the rate at which people continue to dump refuse into the pathways of drainage facilities sets government back in its investments.
Adding that “under no circumstance should anybody dump solid waste into drainage channels because it has a devastating effect on lives and property and on the economy as a whole.”
Projecting the likelihood of this years rainfall pattern, the Minister disclosed that a private dredging company, contracted by the Ministry, has been working in the past month on the Odaw Basin to enable the commencement of the Greater Accra Resilience and Integrated Development (GARID) project to aid compliment the existing projects aimed at mitigating problems of flooding especially communities along the channel of the Odaw Basin.
“Procurement exercises have already commenced and very soon the GARID project will come on stream with additional dredging activities and other construction works to compliment the gains made to strengthen the country’s resilience to flooding” the MP for the Bantama Constituency concluded.
On their part, Dredge Masters, the Private company undertaking the dredging of the Odaw Basin assured that the current exercise, under the Phase 5 of the component, is ahead of schedule and will be completed before the rains set in.
Government has embarked on several interventions to increase the country’s resilience to flooding with financial commitment amounting to Gh450 million over the last four years.
These interventions, namely, the construction, excavation, re-channeling and maintenance of storm drains have resulted in a reduction of perennial devastating floods across the country in recent years.
