The Administrator of the District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF), Michael Harry Yamson, has called for enforcement, coordination, and the political will to act within the instruments Ghana already possesses to address the country's perennial flooding.
"We do not need new legislation, new institutions or new mandates.
The architecture exists.
The financing exists. What is required is those instruments, in large measure, which sit in our hands.
"The binding constraint is not law or institutions but enforcement, inter-agency coordination, financing continuity across electoral cycles and political resolve against encroaching interests the President himself has named," he said in Accra last Monday.
Mr Yamson said calls by a section of the public for the various assemblies to enact new laws to deal with the situation were misplaced.
Taskforce
He said that since March 2025, President John Dramani Mahama has constituted a National Anti-Flood Taskforce chaired by the Deputy Chief of Staff (Operations), Stan Dogbe, with the Ministers of Water Resources, Works and Housing, Local Government, National Security, and the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) all serving on it.
"A Greater Accra Flood Control Master Plan is being integrated into Ghana's National Climate Resilience Strategy.
The World Bank-financed Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development (GARID) programme — with a total investment envelope exceeding US$350 million— is already delivering the structural drainage works: dredging of the Odaw Basin, channel lining, detention ponds and pump station rehabilitation," he said.
The common fund administrator said the "living with water" philosophy the citizen admires from the Netherlands is, in fact, the design logic already embedded in the Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development Project (GARID's) engineering — backed by the Dutch Government itself through performance-based contracting for basin dredging.
Directives
He noted that the President's 2025 directive routing 80 per cent of DACF allocations directly to MMDAs was explicitly framed as enhancing local government capacity to respond to challenges of precisely this nature.
"The Fund has always been a constitutionally mandated financing line for district drainage and sanitation under Article 252 and Act 936. That mandate has now been reinforced with more direct and more predictable resources," he said.
Mr Yamson noted that the deficit in Ghana's flood response is not in law, not in institutions and not in money.
The deficit is in sequencing, enforcement and the willingness of every tier of government to exercise the powers it already holds.
Enforcement
He said what the assemblies required to act was already available.
Subsequently, he urged the assemblies to enforce their "stop-work orders, abatement notices and statutory demolition processes."
"Enforcement must proceed through statutory notice and due process — not by executive declaration — or it will be overturned in court, and the political cost will far exceed the problem it sought to solve.
"Process is not the enemy of urgency. Process is what makes urgency durable," he added.
