A capital in distress

By Kofi Akordor
FOR well over a week Tema, the country’s industrial and port city, and the eastern part of Accra, the national capital, were without water. Ours is not about the lack of water which God has generously provided in abundance. In other places, people have to dig the bowels of the Sahara Desert for water. In other places, people have to settle for sea water using desalination plants.
In our situation, there should not have been any problem but for our inability to convert raw water which is in abundance into potable water for human consumption. In the latest episode, consumers have been told that the pipe taking raw water from the Volta River to the treatment plant is broken, spilling water freely on the main Accra-Akosombo road. So the wise thing to do was to stop the flow of water until the broken pipe was repaired.
According to officials of the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL), the 63-inch pipeline buried 15 feet underground had not seen any maintenance for the over 50 years of its existence. That is typical of us — always waiting for disaster before setting in motion remedial measures. Otherwise, the big question is, why should our national capital, after 54 years of independence, continue to rely on the sole treatment plant at Kpong for water supply?
Apart from technical failure, such as the one we are experiencing now, reliance on one source of water supply, and for that matter all other services, has other dangers, one of which is sabotage which cannot be ruled out. That was why, over the years, we should have taken steps to build more treatment plants at strategic places and properly inter-connected to avoid situations such as the one residents of Tema and Accra East have been going through for more than a week now.
Unfortunately, this type of thinking never occurred to us. Instead, we preferred signing a management contract with a foreign firm to collect tolls for a system it never built and take hefty sums in consultancy fees, while the main problem of inadequate infrastructure in the water sector remained with us.
As stated earlier, ours is not about lack of resources but more about our inability to harness those resources. In fact, the gift that God has given us in the form of the River Volta and the lake formed after the construction of the Akosombo Dam has been woefully under-utilised.
The water downstream of the Kpong Dam flows wastefully into the sea, while we continue to suffer water shortage, not only in Accra and Tema but also other places that are within the Volta Basin. Strangely, the idea to build a treatment plant at Sogakope to transport water from the Volta River to Togo, which is not fortunate like Ghana in terms of water resources, for cash was mixed up by some people, out of ignorance, who talked as if someone was carrying the Volta River away.
The truth is, downstream Sogakope, until we find a better way of using the water, it is a waste because we do not even do irrigation farming with the waters of the river. So any investment that will enable the country to supply its less fortunate eastern neighbour, not for free, while at the same time addressing the water needs of the coastal towns along the route, will not be misplaced. That plant could also have been connected to the existing distribution system, so that on bad days such as what is happening at Kpong, industrial and commercial activities in Accra and Tema will not come to a halt, let alone bring untold hardship to millions of residents.
It is sad to say that we are behind time when it comes to long-term planning. We seem to be putting all our eggs into one basket. Take the case of the Tema Oil Refinery. This was a facility built in the 1960s by the man whose name some people do not want to hear but whose legacy, whether we admit it or not, continues to keep this country going on all fronts. I am talking about Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, the man who, in all things, thought beyond his time.
Even before oil and gas was discovered, the man knew that the best way to assert one’s independence was to be free of external control as much as possible. Today, the irony is that we have oil and gas in abundance but the only refinery cannot refine crude or extract gas because it is old and weak. So, as we have done in the cocoa industry, exporting the raw beans and importing finished cocoa products such as chocolate and beverages, we are exporting crude oil and importing refined petroleum products at great cost. That partly explains why we have been experiencing periodic shortage of gas, a waste material in the oil production chain, on the market.
What prevented us from encouraging the establishment of more refineries which have more advantages than disadvantages, if any. Apart from being avenues for the employment of skilled personnel in the petro-chemical industry, more refineries mean more tax revenue. And, very importantly, we will not be held to ransom by a monopoly.
Until recently, there was only one cement manufacturing factory in the country and the consequences were quite obvious. The monopoly is now broken and the consuming public will agree that they are better off.
Many of the roads in Accra epitomise our short-sightedness. They were not designed and constructed with the future in mind. That is why we speed on the Accra-Tema Motorway, only to be trapped in heavy traffic at a point described as an interchange.
Accra is no where near most capitals in terms of road infrastructure and it will need a massive dose of funds to raise the status of our national capital. That could have been avoided if we had been proactive and planned 50 or even 100 years ahead. This year’s heavy rains have exposed how miserable our city roads are.
In all cases, we wait until the damage is done, and then suddenly we begin to talk reasonably. In the recent Kpong problem, the minister was fast to reach Kpong when the situation was critical and he was heard saying what all rationale thinking people should have known long ago — that it was unwise to rely on one source of water supply.
The situation could have been avoided if there had been more than one treatment plant and there was a system that could feed, say, the Weija Dam water into the Kpong system. Why should this simple fact be lost on us all these years?
Instead of using precious time to think and plan, our leaders prefer using all the time to talk and make wild promises, knowing very well that a greater part of the population cannot remember the last time they heard similar promises.
In his time, Dr Nkrumah thought of what he described as the Golden Triangle. That was the road network linking Accra to Kumasi, Kumasi to Takoradi and Takoradi to Accra, forming a triangle. That was in the 1960s. Today, after 54 years of independence, we cannot drive on an expressway between Accra and Kumasi, our two major cities. That explains why, out of desperation, drivers are compelled to do wrong overtaking which brings with it the danger of accidents.
Apart from the road, water and petroleum sectors, all other areas have similarly been overtaken by population growth and increased demand. The springing up of mushroom tertiary institutions with dubious credentials is the price we are paying for not planning for our children’s education over the years. These institutions may appear to be filling the gap but are actually destroying the human resource of this country. This is a reality that will dawn on us in the next 10 to 20 years when we will have illiterate graduates parading the streets or even the corridors of power with pieces of paper called university degrees.
We may have been sleeping for far too long. Our handicap at Kpong should be a wake-up call for better planning and thinking into the future.

fokofi@yahoo.co.uk
kofiakordor.blogspot.com