On Sunday morning, soldiers from the 48 Engineers Regiment moved into Laboma Beach and began pulling down the Pink Flamingo Lounge and a string of other beachfront businesses sitting inside the protected buffer zone of the Kpeshie Lagoon. It followed a script Accra has run before, a flood, a deadline, bulldozers, and then outrage.
For weeks before the demolition, the same public that will now flood social media with complaints about “heartless” state action was demanding exactly this kind of intervention, just not on themselves. Residents of Ga Central marched through Santa Maria and Sowutuom this month, petitioning their assembly for “urgent and lasting action” on flooding that has ruined televisions, furniture and cars for years. La Bawaleshie residents have petitioned their assembly to order the removal of obstructions choking drainage near their homes. Every rainy season produces the same national chorus. Where is the government? Why hasn’t government fixed this? Why does Accra flood every year while officials do nothing.
Government, this time, did something. And a meaningful share of the public that demanded action is now the public crying foul.
This is not a new pattern in Accra. In June 2015, more than fifty people drowned in floods caused by blocked drains, and that same night a heavy number of people died when a flooded fuel station exploded, one of the worst disasters in Ghana’s history. The public reaction was fury at institutional failure, at drains nobody had cleared, and at a lagoon nobody had dredged. The government’s answer was to demolish structures encroaching on the Korle Lagoon in the settlement known as Sodom and Gomorrah. Residents threw stones. Security forces used tear gas. A decade later, at Laboma, the same argument is being relitigated on a different lagoon with different props.
The pattern holds because the demand and the resistance are never actually in tension in the minds of the people making them. “Fix the flooding” and “don’t touch my structure” feel like two separate, sincere positions, until you notice that the flooding is caused, in no small part, by structures exactly like the one being defended. Kpeshie Lagoon, like Korle before it, has been silted and shrunk by the same encroachment its neighbours want the government to solve. Everyone wants the lagoon dredged. Fewer people want to be the one who moves.
Some business owners in the Kpeshie Lagoon area say they have provided jobs for over 3,000 people. But the question is, why create jobs for people in waterways? What should those whose homes and businesses not in waterways do? Should they endure their homes being flooded because 3,000 people got jobs from businesses in waterways?
None of this means the state gets a free pass on how it complies with its own instincts. A 21-day ultimatum with no resettlement package and no compensation is not the same thing as a serious flood-mitigation policy, it’s the fastest, cheapest version of one, and cheap policy invites exactly the resistance it then gets criticized for provoking. But that is a separate argument from the one playing out in comment sections this week, which is not “the compensation was inadequate”, it is “how dare they demolish my business,” full stop, from people who were separately posting about the state’s negligence the last time the lagoon flooded their neighbourhood.
Ghana cannot keep asking for a government strong enough to solve its infrastructure failures and weak enough to never inconvenience anyone in the process. Somebody’s wall, somebody’s lounge, somebody’s kiosk is always going to be the thing standing in the lagoon’s way. The question worth asking this week isn’t whether the demolitions at Laboma were fair. It’s why so many of the loudest voices calling for a solution assumed, all along, that it would be paid for by someone else’s Sunday morning.
