Everybody got problems. I’ve got ninety-nine, but I would just take this teaspoon and stir my cup of rice-water, drink it cautiously (because of my deteriorating dental issues), after which I would cover myself with these sheets ostensibly to enjoy the cold weather and hope someway somehow, the rains would stop. The weather’s got all the power to give the shower, but it’s been pouring heavily for over an hour, and soon, ECG would take the power. I could hear people scooping out the rain water that was creeping into their rooms. Every time the place floods, someway somehow, I’m never live at the scene. But fate had other plans this time. It was when my mind stopped giving me pleasing accounts of how I had turned my joblessness into romantic moments with my new catch that I asked myself, “is that water?” “Tony, Tony! Sↄriooo! Nsuo nu bawodem hↄ!!” My landlady (I would explain later) called out that same moment. I jumped out of myreverie, got my yellow shorts on, and jumped into action.
I scooped, and scooped; praying the water level would go down a bit. But the rains wouldn’t stop. The sight of my old landlady, her daughter and fellow tenants scooping made me feel like I was Jonah. I asked God to forgive me for a certain sin I had committed the previous evening. Close to an hour after saying that prayer, the rain ceased. Three to four hours later, we were done fetching all the water out, and we returned to our rooms to count our (wet) losses. When you pray for rain, be prepared for mud (and in places like Circle, Teshie, Ashiaman, and my hood, be prepared for flood). Forget about the ‘mayweather’, this is the ‘Juneweather’ and yearly, we make noise about floods, and a month or so after the floods, we forget the devastating effects it had on us, until it comes again, then we start scooping out, our leaders (wear jeans and black t-shirts) and start promising, Ghana Fire Service and NADMO become baffled, sirens blare, Korle Bu becomes full, fuel containers explode, people drown, lose their belongings, lives (and virginities), electricity poles catch fire, ‘kwashey’ and sakawa boys return home because water may be creeping into their ghettos, Ashiamantrotro drivers wonder if it was a good decision to go on strike since water would’ve entered the engines of their vehicles and money to fix them would be another headache. Nothing is more disheartening than the fact that the waakye seller wouldn’t come to work the next day because she spent all-night saving her cooking pots from being carried away by the raging water.
So who should we blame? If not our leaders, then who? My late grandmother? You must be joking! Nobody prevented nobody from dismantling my property that was in a waterway. All I wanted was appropriate compensation. If you demolish my structure (mostly done without notice), where do you expect me to spend the night? In my grandmother’s grave? What have you done to stop those who wouldn’t stop polluting the drainage system? How about covering it? How about making more underground drainages? How would I dump rubbish in an underground drainage? Stop blaming me for your inability to be creative in seeking solutions to the problems you’ve been elected (or appointed) to solve.You said we should do Sanitation Day, we obeyed. That’s rather a short-term thing. How about your long-term goals? It is about time these suit-wearing and SUV-driving people we call leaders leave Legon girls alone and think about how to solve problems. We put you there to solve problems. So that when we come back from selling our yoghurt, and carrying the ‘kponkpos’, and other places of work, there should be electricity, armed robbers wouldn’t trouble our peace, and when our undergraduate kids leave school, they would get some sort of ‘nokofioo’ employment to hold on to.
It is just the rains and see what’s happening. Can you imagine what it would’ve looked like had these floods been caused by tsunamis, snowmelts, dam breakdowns, unusual high tides amongst others? What’s happening to our Meteorological Service? If salaries were unpaid, they would’ve been on strike. But they can’t sensitize us on the imminence of bad weather, and constantly remind this forgetful government on the need to appropriately prepare for the heavy rains.
We have monies to pay judgment debts, undertake questionable projects, and bid to host sport tournaments, yet we can’t build dams, weirs, and series of reservoirs and canals that would solely serve for the purposes of flood control.When South Korea has spent over 18billion USD to completely solve the problem of flooding, what have we put in place? When Korea spent that much in four years to build sixteen weirs, creating artificial wetlands and ecological waterways, a section of us down here just prays, another section loots, another promises (and then promises to stop promising when the going gets tough and the promises don’t look promising), another turn the lights off and on every second, another is searching for acid to attack another, another is laying off another, and at the end of the year, the same issues appear before us again.
What do we use our (if we even have any) technology for? And Kwame Nkrumah’s dearest institutions are producing students with ‘memorized knowledge’ instead of making us have the benefit of practical knowledge. Dear KNUST students, let’s go beyond solar traffic lights (though it’s remarkable) and designing ‘dumsor’ android applications, and doing sextapes,and exploit technology to make our existence easier. Life’s hard; it’s harder when you don’t learn from past mistakes.
Oh wait! My lights went out!!
TONY AFUTI EYRAM,
KNUST.
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