Flooding requires better planning, not just clean-up campaigns – Kosi Dedey
Policy analyst and engineer Michael Kosi Dedey has urged the government to adopt a long-term strategy to tackle flooding, insisting that periodic clean-up campaigns alone cannot resolve Ghana’s persistent sanitation and flood-related challenges.
Speaking on Channel One TV’s Breakfast Daily about the ongoing two-day national clean-up exercise, Dedey acknowledged the importance of such initiatives but stressed that they should be complemented by effective urban planning, improved waste management and stronger local governance.
He argued that Ghana has become too dependent on reactive measures instead of addressing the underlying causes of poor sanitation and recurring floods.
“We need to do the real hard work of planning and developing our cities rather than this knee-jerk reaction of, ‘Let’s go and clean up, let’s go and do this.’ I mean, it doesn’t help,” he said.
Dedey called on the government to strengthen the role of Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) by giving them greater responsibility for waste management instead of relying predominantly on private waste collection companies.
“We need to ensure that the state is working properly and waste is managed by districts or by assembly,” he stated.
He also questioned the effectiveness of existing sanitation contracts, arguing that authorities must ensure contractors entrusted with maintaining public spaces are fulfilling their obligations.
“We need to ensure that we don’t pay people and then come around again and say, ‘Let’s go and mobilize people to clean up’ for things that people are already being paid for. Those, for me, are things that we as a nation should be looking at,” he said.
The policy analyst further suggested that the fragmentation of district assemblies has weakened coordinated urban planning and service delivery, calling for a review of the current administrative structure.
“I sincerely think that we should go back and bring together some of the districts that we have fragmented seriously, to ensure that every district can quickly manage and do the work because the fundamental issue is that we are not planning our cities and developing them,” he said.
Dedey also advised against rushing into solutions such as waste-to-energy projects without first addressing the systemic shortcomings in urban planning and waste management.
“Let’s sit down as a country and ask the important question: What is fundamentally wrong with our planning and management system? Let’s not do an easy ‘let’s do waste-to-energy’ because we’ve heard it somewhere,” he said.
He maintained that lasting solutions to flooding would require comprehensive city planning, stronger local institutions and efficient waste management systems rather than relying on emergency clean-up exercises after disasters occur.
About The Author
