Editorial: Perennial Flooding And Unending Galamsey

On Monday, June 29, 2026 Ghana’s coastal enclave was overwhelmed as Greater Accra and sections of the Central and Volta Regions went under water. The downpour that began at the wee hours of the day lasted nearly thirteen hours, severely affecting Weija, Mallam, Kaneshie, Awudome, Avenor, Alajo, Achimota among others.

Rescue teams, including the Ghana Armed Forces’ ‘Boafo’ unit, Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS), NADMO, the Ghana Police Service and ordinary citizens worked to contain the damage.

Fire outbreaks were also reported elsewhere, notably at Kwame Nkrumah Circle. Communities were submerged, property destroyed and twelve lives lost.

Schools, shops and banks shut down as residents sought refuge on rooftops, while overflowing drains washed away roads at Pig Farm and Kwashieman, with vehicles overturned by the floodwaters.

The Chronicle is happy that President John Dramani Mahama has directed the immediate release of GH¢300 million from the Contingency Fund for flood relief. He had earlier instructed NADMO’s flood taskforce to prepare a comprehensive presentation on Ghana’s flooding situation for action by the government.

While The Chronicle commends the President for this response, the recurrence of such disasters in our view is troubling. Accra’s growing unsuitability for habitation stems not from any deficiency of capacity, but from identifiable institutional failures.

These are weak enforcement by local authorities (MMDAs), elite complicity in the sale of protected wetlands and a persistent gap between policy and enforcement that has hardened into normal practice.

As Ghana enters its ninth decade of grappling with flooding, the relevant question is not whether Ghanaians are capable of governing themselves, but why the institutions tasked with doing so have been allowed to fail repeatedly, without consequence.

Ghana’s first officially recorded major flood struck Accra in 1933, fourteen years before independence, since it complicates any narrative that frames flooding purely as a post-independence governance failure.

The pattern has nonetheless recurred under every subsequent government. In April 1960, torrential rains brought the capital to a standstill; in July 1995, floods devastated Accra and Axim displacing thousands and in 1999, roughly 300,000 people across the Upper West, Upper East, and Northern regions were affected. What has changed since 1933 is not the rainfall, but the scale of unregulated construction on the waterways meant to absorb it.

It remains difficult to understand why developers continue to build on Ramsar sites, which serve as natural water buffers. Wetlands earmarked for water retention have routinely been sold off, often with the complicity of traditional leaders and politicians, while many citizens have turned gutters and storm drains into refuse dumps, blocking the channels meant to carry water away.

MMDAs have largely turned a blind eye to spatial planning, allowing unchecked construction that ultimately endangers the residents it was meant to serve. Climate change is undeniably driving more extreme weather, but Ghana has shown insufficient urgency addressing a crisis that worsens yearly.

Kwame Nkrumah famously declared at the Polo Grounds that “the black man is capable of managing his own affairs.” That capacity was never in serious doubt; what remains unproven, eight decades on, is whether Ghana’s institutions have been built and held to standards that let that capacity translate into outcomes. For three decades, illegal mining has ravaged farmlands, forests, and water bodies, not for want of capacity to stop it, but because the political and traditional establishment has repeatedly chosen not to.

The Chronicle insists that government action must move beyond rhetoric. MCEs and DCEs who permit unauthorised development should face prosecution, signalling that enforcement is real. That standard will mean little, however, unless applied consistently.

A government that prosecutes ordinary officials while letting politically connected cases languish, only confirms the selective justice it claims to be fighting. Ghana’s democracy must demonstrate it can confront, not merely discuss, the challenges before it.

 

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