EDITORIAL: New Tetteh-Quashie Interchange & Other Matters

To: Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey, Nii Adjiri-Blankson, Prof. Hagan

From: ADM

Subject: The New Tetteh-Quashie Interchange & Other Matters

You may have driven there already, but please take another drive to the just opened Tetteh-Quashie Interchange. Spend some time going round the place and you would observe that the City of Accra could do a lot of things to enhance the place.

Pretty soon, we are sure advertisers would buy all the open spaces there to erect all manner of ugly billboards, all in the name of business. We hope you will not bow to the temptation of allowing them.

For once, let us see some "cultural creativity" in the utilization of our open and public spaces. This new interchange has a lot of open spaces crying out for sculpture pieces, fountains and proper landscaping.

Let us not forget that the place is named after the man credited for bringing cocoa - The Golden Pod - into our country. If there is any look we must give the place it should be arboreal and not the screaming jungle of advertising hoardings.

This brings us to the other open public spaces we in our capital which no one seems to care about. The time, we believe has come for us to start taking an interest and working to make them public friendly. There's so much we can do with the Independence Arch for example which stands aloof and forbidding.

The space in front of Flagstaff House is screaming for a new and softer image. Dr. J.B. Danquah's statue at Danquah Circle has just been "plonked" there without any aesthetic considerations. And what of our public buildings?

The Osu Castle, our seat of power is a disgrace. As one approaches the Castle, one observes so much open space with hardly anything to show that the dignity of our nation reposes there. And so on and so forth...

Since AMA has already embarked on a decongestion exercise in the Central Business District of our capital, we must see some integration with other sectors to make the modernization and beautification of our capital a reality.

Should this work, we believe it would then be easy to replicate same in our other urban/rural centers. But for Heaven's sake, let us not vandalise the Tetteh-Quarshie Interchange with advertising billboards.

Those around the old Tetteh-Quarshie Circle are enough!