COMMENT: Transfer Ghana Water Company to 48 Engineers Regiment?

By Kofi Thompson

Current events clearly show that the time has come for a radical approach to the business of providing treated water for both domestic usage and industrial purposes in Ghana.


It is totally unacceptable that in 21st century Africa, a nation such as Ghana is still unable to provide something as basic as treated water, for distribution through underground networks of pipelines to its citizens countrywide, on a sustained basis.


If one stops for a while to do some lateral thinking, it soon becomes obvious that the current structure of the ponderous behemoth that is the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL), though a commercial failure, makes it a perfect fit and takeover candidate, for the military in Ghana to absorb into its fold - and run efficiently for the benefit of all Ghanaians.


Any transfer of the GWCL to the 48 Engineers Regiment to run as one of the entities in the Ghana Armed Forces' Defence Industries wing, must be done in tandem with a complete ban of the production and sale of sachet water countrywide.


The GWCL could derive substantial revenues from a monopoly given it by law, to produce bottled (biodegradable, naturally!) filtered water for the companies currently producing sachet water.

Those companies could be made distributors of their own-label bottled filtered water produced for them in hygienic conditions by the GWCL - to distribute as a business to replace the lost revenue from the production of sachet water: an enterprise that really ought to be banned completely in Ghana for public health reasons.


The plastic used to store the bagged water for sale to the public not being impermeable, it freely admits outside pollutants through minute pores too small for the naked eye to see - making the water potentially harmful to human health.


The production of sachet water of the type that goes on in Ghana, would never be permitted in any nation where consumer protection is taken seriously, and hygiene regulations governing the production of water for sale to the public to drink, strictly enforced.


Above all, Ghanaians would no longer be held to ransom and be denied water by disgruntled employees of a GWCL - out to take revenge on a government of the day against which they had a grievance and wanted to make unpopular politically - were it transferred to the 48 Engineers Regiment to run as a business.


Water is life - and its production and distribution must not be allowed to become political football under any circumstances.

The production of treated water for distribution to homes offices, schools factories and other building structures nationwide, must not be allowed to become infected by the divisive politics currently practised in Ghana.


There are those who say that the current dry-taps-phenomenon in homes and businesses in urban Ghana, might be part of the pattern of shortages of the essentials of modern life (the disappearance of LPG gas cited to me as an example), deliberately engineered for political reasons, as part of a regime-change strategic plan by some of the most determined opponents of the present regime. If true, that would certainly be intolerable.


One hopes that that is not the case, but to forestall that ever happening, the GWCL must be taken out of the hands of the hapless civilian managers who have failed so miserably to run it efficiently over the decades, and handed over to the 48 Engineers Regiment to manage going forward.


Email: peakofi.thompson@gmail.com.