Blaming Accra’s perennial flooding solely on indiscipline may be politically appealing, but it risks overlooking a deeper structural problem: the city’s drainage infrastructure is struggling to cope with the demands of a rapidly expanding urban population.
That is the assessment of award-winning built environment expert, Eric Eduam, who argues that while irresponsible human behaviour contributes significantly to flood risks, engineering limitations and outdated infrastructure remain at the heart of the challenge.
His comments come in the wake of remarks by President John Dramani Mahama during a diaspora town hall meeting in the United Kingdom, where he stated in response to a concern from a questioner on Accra’s flood crisis that : “With regards to flooding, the flooding in Accra is not an engineering problem. It is just a problem of indiscipline. It’s not an engineering problem, it’s a problem of indiscipline.”
The President explained that waste disposal practices remain a major contributor to blocked drains.
“We have drains, and everybody says, why don’t you do sealed drains? But the problem is when we do sealed drains, people drink sachet water, they eat papaya in those styrofoam plastics, and they just dump them anywhere and these plastics wash into the drain, and they go and block the drain,” he said.
But Eduam believes the reality is far more complex.
“I would say the issue is not an either-or situation; it is a combination of both,” he said.
According to him, practices such as indiscriminate dumping of refuse into drains, building on waterways and encroachment on flood plains undeniably worsen flooding. However, he cautioned against treating these behaviours as the primary explanation for a problem that is increasingly being driven by infrastructure constraints.
“Many parts of Accra’s drainage infrastructure were designed decades ago under completely different urban conditions,” he explained.
“The population, density of development, paved surfaces and rainfall patterns have changed dramatically. Engineering infrastructure must evolve alongside urban growth.”
A City Growing Faster Than Its Infrastructure
At the centre of the engineer’s argument is a simple reality: Accra today is fundamentally different from the city for which much of its drainage network was originally designed.
Infrastructure that may have been adequate in the 1970s and 1980s is now being asked to serve a metropolitan area with more than five million residents, extensive commercial development and significantly higher levels of surface runoff.
“As natural vegetation and open land are replaced with concrete, asphalt and buildings, rainfall that would normally infiltrate the soil becomes surface runoff,” Eduam noted.
“The same rainfall today generates substantially more runoff than it did several decades ago.”
This means that even when drains are functioning properly, the sheer volume of water generated during heavy storms can overwhelm existing systems.
Many drainage channels, he said, are already operating beyond their intended design capacity.
Flooding Is an Engineering Problem Too
While public discussions often focus on sanitation and waste management, Eduam insists flooding is fundamentally a hydrological and engineering challenge.
It involves rainfall intensity, runoff volumes, drainage capacity, land use planning and stormwater storage infrastructure.
Even highly disciplined cities experience flooding when drainage systems are undersized relative to the amount of water entering them.
Conversely, he acknowledged that even the best-engineered drainage system can fail if it becomes clogged with waste.
“Human behaviour alone can trigger localised flooding,” he said. “But when we observe widespread flooding across various parts of Accra, infrastructure limitations almost always play a critical role.”
Missing Infrastructure
Beyond ageing drains, Eduam identified several engineering deficiencies that continue to leave parts of Accra highly vulnerable.
Among them are inadequate drain capacity, incomplete drainage connections and a shortage of stormwater retention infrastructure.
Modern flood management systems increasingly rely on retention ponds, detention basins, wetlands and holding facilities that temporarily store excess water during intense rainfall events.
Such infrastructure helps reduce pressure on drainage networks and lowers the risk of flash flooding.
“Accra has relatively limited stormwater storage infrastructure compared with rapidly growing cities elsewhere,” he observed.
The absence of these systems means rainfall moves quickly through urban areas, overwhelming drains and increasing flood risks during major storms.
The Three Drivers of Flooding
Rather than searching for a single culprit, Eduam believes policymakers should view flooding as the product of three interconnected factors: infrastructure capacity, maintenance and human behaviour.
“If any one of these fails, flood risk increases,” he explained.
However, from an engineering perspective, he considers drainage capacity the foundational issue.
“A drain that is undersized will struggle even when perfectly maintained. Similarly, a well-designed drain can underperform if neglected or obstructed.”
The challenge, therefore, is not simply cleaning drains or enforcing sanitation regulations, but simultaneously investing in infrastructure upgrades, improving maintenance and changing public behaviour.
Would Clean Drains Solve the Problem?
One of the most persistent assumptions in public discourse is that flooding would largely disappear if drains were kept free of waste.
Eduam disagrees.
“If every drain in Accra were completely free of waste today, flooding would certainly reduce, but it would not disappear,” he said.
Clean drains improve water flow and reduce localised flooding. However, they cannot increase the physical carrying capacity of drainage systems.
If rainfall volumes exceed what the drainage network was designed to handle, flooding will still occur.
“This happens in cities across the world, including some of the most advanced urban centres,” he noted.
A Call for a Broader Conversation
The engineer’s intervention introduces a more nuanced perspective into Ghana’s long-running flood debate.
While the President’s concerns about indiscriminate waste disposal reflect a genuine challenge confronting city authorities, Eduam argues that focusing exclusively on behaviour risks underestimating the scale of investment and planning reforms required to make Accra more resilient.
His conclusion is clear: flooding is not simply a sanitation issue, nor purely an engineering failure.
It is the result of a city whose population growth, urbanisation and changing climate realities have outpaced infrastructure originally built for a very different era.
For Accra to break its annual cycle of flood-related destruction, the solution may require more than cleaner drains and better behaviour. It may require a fundamental rethinking of how the city plans, builds and manages its stormwater infrastructure for the decades ahead.
