The painful truth about the latest floods
The floods that are currently ravaging parts of the country, especially Accra, the national capital, and its environs, fill me with sorrow. And rage.
Rage because they didn’t have to happen. And if they did, the damage to property and harm to human lives would have been far less and more manageable than they are now if we had done the right thing over a decade ago. But we didn’t.
In 2017, when I was winding down my tenure as director-general of the National Development Planning Commission, we completed a long-term national development plan that came to be known informally as the 40-Year Development Plan.
Despite the name, it was not about what was to be done in 40 years, but what had to be done in the short term (beginning in 2018) to ensure a safe and prosperous future for Ghanaians, including the building of “Well-planned and safe communities while protecting the natural environment,” the third of five goals of the Plan. Some cynics, however, declared that “in 40 years we will all be dead” and effectively doomed the Plan before they had even read it.
This was unfortunate, because, among other things, the Plan contained other sub-plans designed to prevent, or at least minimise the impact of, the kind of floods we are witnessing now. One was the Ghana Infrastructure Plan (GIP) (2018-2047) and the other was the National Spatial Development Framework (2015-2035). Together, they formed the most transformative attempts to rationalise human settlements planning since the National Physical Plan that accompanied Kwame Nkrumah’s Seven Year Development Plan of 1963.
The GIP was made up of nine volumes and covered a range of topics, including “Integrated Waste Management” and “Drainage, Flood Control and Coastal Protection”, which included:
Flood management practices
Flood forecasting framework
Addressing Accra and other urban centres drainage challenges
Institutional arrangements for flood control and coastal protection management.
Implementation of the Spatial Development Framework had started in 2015, two years before the completion of the GIP, and in 2016, the Land Use and Spatial Planning Authority (LUSPA) was established, replacing Town and Country Planning.
The GIP was partly based on the Framework and so they became mutually reinforcing. Implementation of the two was supported by a range of policies, including (1) the National Housing Policy (2015); (2) the National Urban Policy and Action Plan (2012); (3) the Zoning Guidelines and Planning Standards of 2011), which detailed “permissible land uses within classified zones;” and (4) the National Climate Change Policy (2013) (to help mitigate the impact of climate change on infrastructure).
Specific interventions included the “revitalisation of distressed mining towns;” a “national urban regeneration programme;” and the “smart growth of rural communities and towns.” Just over 20 million rooms were to be built over 30 years to address Ghana’s worsening housing crisis. It was a bold and visionary attempt to transform Ghana into a high-income country by 2057, our centenary.
The GIP, however, was abandoned and was eventually launched in October 2025 by President Mahama, who directed the Commission to update it for future implementation. LUSPA exists, but barely. Only a handful of assemblies have prepared their spatial development frameworks as required by law. This explains the chaos and squalor in cities and towns across the country.
The situation has been aggravated by endemic corruption in some of the assemblies, where compromised development control officers allow encroachment by recalcitrant residents.
In late 2025, I filed a citizen’s complaint with one of the assemblies in Accra over the erection of structures on a piece of land for what appeared to be a used car lot, one of many that have indiscriminately mushroomed around the city in the past few years and have become both an eyesore and a threat to the environment. Instead of rain water being soaked into the ground, as nature intended it, it would now run off onto the streets and eventually into people’s homes and businesses as floods, I worried.
When the assembly didn’t act, I escalated it to the sector minister, who directed them to stop the encroachment. Instead, they gave my name to the encroachers – in violation of civil service rules – who then persuaded, of all people, a former mayor of Accra to call and plead with me to withdraw my complaint. I refused, of course. But they went ahead anyway, and as the streets down from the spot have flooded in recent days, I wonder how much of the water would have been absorbed into the ground where the used car lot and others nearby now stand.
I’ve thought about suing the MCE and the assembly for violating my right to privacy, to send a message to all assemblies, including those that act with impunity. The drama we see of assembly officials on social media seemingly angrily pulling down structures in waterways is just that – drama. Most are neck-deep in the corruption that has brought us the crisis. They are as guilty of indiscipline as those they accuse of indiscipline are.
We have a crisis of civic decadence that must be tackled holistically on all sides.
This is exactly what the Commission is working to address as it prepares a Consolidated National Development Plan that will give both the GIP and the Spatial Development Framework a new lease on life and bring Ghana back to a more strategic path to long-term development that includes well-planned communities where the effects of natural disasters are minimised.
A major component of the Plan will be a campaign for “New Values, New Society,” based on 12 themes from the Directive Principles of State Policy of the Constitution. It aims to address the perennial calls for Ghanaians to “change their attitudes” for the better. It’s way past time!
The author is the chairman of the National Development Planning Commission and the President’s Senior Advisor on the Sustainable Development Goals, including Goal 9 (resilient infrastructure).
