Accra Floods: Sack Accra Mayor- AFAG

Alliance for Accountable Governance (AFAG), a pressure and advocacy group in Ghana, has called on President John Mahama to sack the Accra mayor, Dr Alfred Oko Vanderpuye, for failing to take necessary actions to clean up the city in order to avoid disaster.

“The mayor of Accra, Alfred Oko Vanderpuye should be fired. As mayor, with all the powers of his office, it was his duty to clean up the city and to take necessary action to avoided this disaster. He woefully failed in his duties,” AFAG said in a statement released on June 4, 2015.

Many parts of the capital, Accra, have been completely submerged after hours of torrential rains on Wednesday left many residents homeless and roads impassable.

To add to the misery, a GOIL fuel station at Circle in Accra which had passersby seeking shelter from the rains, was guttered by fire killing over a hundred people.

AFAG stressed that, the reported deaths of fellow citizens from a predictable event like flooding in Accra could have been prevented; adding, “this is unacceptable and Ghanaians must ask the Mayor of Accra and the President why they have allowed this solvable and preventable calamity to claim precious lives”.

The statement explained that “President Mahama has failed in his duty to protect Ghanaian lives for lack of or the failure of implementing a comprehensive drainage plan for the capital. We challenge him to present to the nation a drainage plan in the next three months. We also call on him to personally take a direct leadership role in addressing this problem”.

“As a people, we cannot escape part of the blame. We have turned drains into refuse dumps and toilets. This has led to choking of drains thereby worsening the situation. We must change our third-world attitude. It is reprehensible,” AFAG reiterated.

It added that “as a matter of urgency, the Mahama/Amissah-Arthur government should implement without delay, a desilting exercise as a first step towards solving the drainage challenge”.

AFAG congratulated the Military, Police and other service agencies for the role they played yesterday.