Stop work, produce permit

By Kofi Akordor
Many Ghanaians are now used to the military-like order: “Stop work! Produce permit”. These warnings are boldly written in red paint and can be found on many buildings in the Accra-Tema metropolitan area and other major commercial towns. They are indications that a structure is either wrongly sited or the developer has not got the necessary building permits from the lawful authorities such as the Town and Country Planning Department or the appropriate metropolitan, municipal or district assembly.
Whatever the case may be, the bottom line is that the right thing had not been done. Interestingly, work never stops on almost all the structures with the above warnings which eventually get completed. These are the structures built on waterways, in green zones or are located on plots of land that are meant for other things such as schools and recreational facilities but definitely not those put on them.
It is amazing how individuals and organisations have been able to flout building regulations with such impunity over the years. Today, it is easy to erect a magnificent edifice of a house without access road. After all everyone is exercising his or her right to put up a house and where one passes to get to that house becomes secondary. That explains why Accra, our national capital, has become a huge jungle of traffic jams and lawless drivers. It explains why the slightest drizzle cuts off some parts of the city from the rest. It explains why school parks and recreational grounds have become noisy drinking bars and chapels. It explains why green zones which were demarcated purposely to break the monotony of steel and concrete and to bring human beings closer to nature have been turned into factories spewing out carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and filling the drains with poisonous effluents.
This wanton disregard for building regulations has gained acceptability and become the norm instead of the exception due to official connivance. One telephone call to a big man sitting somewhere or a crumpled envelope pressed into the palm of an official from the supervising agency makes a wrong deed right, damn the future consequences.
This country has got enough laws to make it a safe haven but a combination of factors include lack of courage and the will power to enforce the laws and corrupt tendencies which have neutralised public officials have rendered our laws mere paper tigers. Sometimes in our desperation, we wrongly think the solution lies in making more laws when enforcing the existing ones would have done the trick.
There is an order banning the sale of drugs on vehicles which has never been enforced. Tro-tro vehicles have also become mobile chapels with people who could hardly write their names proclaiming themselves as evangelists and disturbing the peace of passengers but nobody seems to have the guts to stop the menace. The police administration always reminds motorists that it is an offence to drive vehicles with tainted glasses. While police officers are busy checking ‘papers’ of drivers, vehicles with heavily tainted glasses are found all over the place as if it is nobody’s business.
Taxi and tro-tro drivers have created their own speed lanes on the shoulders of our roads while our law enforcement agencies watch helplessly until an innocent school pupil or a mother with a baby strapped at the back is knocked down before they move into action. Seriously speaking, pedestrians cannot use the shoulders of the roads which are the safest part of the roads available to them without the danger of being knocked down by careless drivers.
Recently, the police mounted an exercise with a lot of fanfare to check careless driving and speeding on the Accra-Tema Motorway. After just a day on the road, the police have withdrawn until another accident then the media hype starts all over.
As for our churches, especially the Pentecostal and the charismatic ones, they never get their message to God unless it is packaged in a noisy form. Most of these worship centres are in residential areas which should not have been allowed in the first place, but woe unto any person who protests against the violation of his/her right to a quiet evening or a peaceful sleep. That person becomes the devil incarnate before those self-proclaimed righteous church members. The city authorities whose own by-laws prohibit noise-making are impotent to apply the law they took pains to draft.
The Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA), itself has a lot of explanations to offer for failing to enforce its by-laws and regulations. The battle against hawking on the streets and pavements is almost lost. The more the AMA makes the noise of decongesting the city of traders doing business in unauthorised places, the more the multitudes that throng the place. Tetteh-Quarshie Interchange, that cauldron of confusion and congestion, has become the latest hotbed of city trading but the authorities have failed to terminate another potential Abuja or Sodom and Gomorrah at its embryonic stage. They are waiting until it festers into a gangrenous wound that may defy treatment in future.
The AMA’s directive against the erection of billboards at places where they obstruct the view of motorists has been treated with contempt, so is its order against the new phenomenon of video/musical cassette sales accompanied by loud music on the streets.
As for urinating in public, there is no better way to treat the ban with disdain than to urinate on the wall with the inscription; ”Do not urinate here, by AMA” itself. The AMA has to tell the public what has happened to its directive to taxi drivers to wear special uniforms. As it is now, those who obeyed the directive will look like fools before the rest who treated the directive with contempt.
The Ghana Education Service (GES) has given up enforcing the order prohibiting the commercialisation of extra classes using public school classrooms just as it could not stop some religious bodies from using classrooms as places of worship.
The list is endless but it goes to prove that we are only interested in making laws and regulations or giving directives without the clout to enforce them. We complain of indiscipline in our national life not because we lack the requisite laws to regulate our behaviour. Should we compound the situation by making more laws, or we simply enforce existing ones? That could be done if those who fashioned the laws and who are responsible for their enforcement have faith in them. Other than that this country will remain a jungle of lawlessness amidst a thousand and one laws.

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fokofi@yahoo.co.uk