Building a house in Accra
It has taken me 14 difficult, long years to build this single-storey building somewhere along the Weija-Kasoa road.
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Along the way I have encountered land guards, treachery, thieving workmen, numerous bank loans, superstition and astronomical prices of land.
Land
A friend helped me to acquire the land, a 100 by 100 acre in 1998 or so at ¢3 million, now GH¢300. I had to pay for it in instalments and l remember the last ¢200 (GH¢20 ) has not been paid.
The last time I checked the price of a plot of land in the area, it was a very stupendous 60,000 Mahama cedis.
Shortly after I had acquired the land, the chief of the town died and his successor rezoned the area, reduced the size of my plot and resold the land. Earlier, I had bought a plot of land in the Ablekuma area. One day, I went there and saw a two-room structure on the land. I pulled half of it down and, nearly passed out from sheer anger and exhaustion and have never gone to the area again.
This time, however, I was determined. I immediately went to the new chief, introduced myself and after much pleading, a delegation sent by the chief saw my stones and sand on the plot and attested to my ownership of the plot. The rest is history. I was asked to start work immediately.
I started the project on a shoestring in January. I postponed Christmas, saved my bonus salary from work, collected my two months’ salary as the practice then was and trooped to that desolate area on top of the Aplaku hills. The price of cement was less than five cedis. Today, that community has become a virtual metropolis with big buildings. The only drawback is its poor road network, the lack of a good drainage system and the proverbial water problem.
Every weekend, I had to travel from Tema Community Three, where I lived, to supervise the initial concrete foundation, block works and filling with sand.
l had to suspend the oversight concrete because I was misadvised to use only sand for the filling instead of laterite. After buying 10 trips of sand I was ready to call it quits before another mason advised me to use laterite for the filling.
Land guards
Before l reached this stage l had to contend with the many land guards in the area. The first day we started digging the foundation channels, one group came and demanded what they described as “digging fee”, which I paid.
The following week, another group came and demanded “foundation fee”. l eventually had to part with some Kufuor cedis. The following week , l was at an editorial conference and as the then Chief Sub-Editor of the Daily Graphic, I was busy selecting stories for the next day’s production, when a call came through my giant Motorola mobile phone that some land guards had invaded the site and seized my shovels, pickaxes, headpans and container for storing water. They virtually confiscated the mortar the workmen had mixed for the day’s work. Their reason was that they wanted some cash for a festival; I saw red. With the help of some friends, we sought assistance from some policemen at the Panthers Unit. Within 20 minutes we were at the site. One of the cops let loose some warning shots and the land guards scampered.The one we arrested who was incidentally the leader of the first group l had paid off, received some dirty “koti” slaps and some drills before I interceded and pleaded for his release.
No land guard came to the site again; they always stood far from me and muttered some phrases in Ga whenever they saw me.
Stealing
I used to buy food from a waakye seller at the site. I respected her a lot for her struggles to educate her many children and so I occasionally brought them some things from home. One day she told me that before I arrived at the site that day, some of the workmen had carried some bags of cement from there to a nearby bush. So l nonchalantly walked to the location and retrieved six bags of cement. None of the workmen accepted the blame. I got very angry, dismissed all the workers and closed down the site for nearly a year.
When l got back a year later, the place had changed as many houses were under construction or had been completed. Many of my cement blocks had been stolen. Nonetheless I plodded on and by 2006 the ground floor had been completed but without windows fixed. Some squatters moved in without any permission from me. It took me a long time to dislodge them before we could fix the windows.
Loans
At the last count during the course of the project, I had, like the country Ghana, become an expert in taking loans. I took all the available loans l could lay my hands on .Some of the interest on the loans were exorbitant but they had to be taken.
Building permit
When I was starting the project, I submitted my building plan and other documents to the district assembly.Three months later when I went back to the assembly, the file could not be traced.Thankfully, a friend advised me that l could wait for 10 years without getting a permit and therefore asked me to start the project.
I took his advice. And six months into the project, some officials of the assembly came and wrote the usual “stop work” on the building. After negotiating with them, I plodded on.
Later when the government’s electrification project reached the area, somebody helped me to obtain the requisite permits for the building, ,electricity and water at a very big fee.
I literally live by the banks of the Densu, near the desecrated ramsey site, and every day I watch hundreds of gallons of water snake its way into the sea at nearby Bortianor .Yet after paying GH¢600 for the water meter no water flows through the taps and we have to buy water constantly. Many of the households in the area have dug wells and I am contemplating acquiring one.
The very bad road network and the absence of drainage system detract from the beauty of the area. Erosion is threatening the road network and some houses. How I wish President Mahama would extend his asphalting of some road networks in the Accra metropolis to Block factory at New Aplaku.
House owners have different tales to tell about how they built their homes. Most of the tales have a common theme of struggles, theft of some of their building materials and workmen spending less time on site working and yet collecting a full day’s wage, what they call “ by day”. I still struggle to pay my loans, but I am happy because the other choice of continuously renting a home is not an option for me. I find that economically unwise.