If not for sickness, travelling or financial constraints, flooding is one of the major reasons why some school children are forced to stay away from school.
No parent will be happy to entrust his or her child’s life to a flood which comes as a result of our attitude as citizens and the government’s unwillingness to solve issues leading to floods once and for all.
According to the BBC, flooding started in Ghana in 1995 and its still persistent now as it was then.
Again, According to the National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO), on the 18th and 28th of June 2018, a heavy downpour with thunderstorms in two big cities, Greater Accra and Greater Kumasi claimed the lives of fourteen (14) people, displaced thirty-four thousand and seventy-six (34,076) people and properties damaged were estimating $168,289.
Not forgetting our painful incident on June 3 at Kwame Nkrumah Circle, Accra.
Flooding is not only a government problem, our attitudes as citizens are also a contributing factor. A citizen will prefer pouring refuse into gutters which are created for the free flow of water, and this act ends up choking our gutters and anytime there is a heavy downpour, the rain water can’t flow through the gutters but rather forces its way into our rooms, shops, churches, mosques, schools and what have you
Another cause of flooding in Ghana is people building on waterways. With this attitude, l do not blame the builders much because, before one could raise a building, the person needs a permit from the appropriate Authorities, for instance, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA).
So the question is why can’t AMA detect where they are giving this builder the permit to build is not safe.? Yet AMA goes ahead to give such permits to citizens and at the end of the day, lives and properties are destroyed.
Flooding is affecting our school children’s learning in so many ways. There are some regions in Ghana which require school children to stay home for some number of days because, after a heavy downpour, the school buildings are not safe for students to be in. While some students are home, others are busily continuing with their studies. At the end of the day, the same questions will be set for all.
Most of our children complete school with bad results and we turn to blame teachers? Have we asked ourselves the number of days our children stayed home because of flooding in their schools? Let’s not consider such flooding as a petty issue because it has its own way of affecting our school children.
School children at times lose all their learning materials to flooding. At times it takes a student a whole semester to raise money to buy these materials only for one heavy downpour to ruin everything. Have we thought of the trauma this child will go through?
When again is such a child going to get these materials and how soon will that be?
Most private schools are facing a lot of challenges when it comes to flooding in Ghana.
School children cannot move from home anytime it rains because flooding has been the order of the day, especially in Greater Accra.
“This is a worry because we have structured our syllabus with the number of weeks we have so if students are not able to go to school because the whole place is flooded due to rainfall, then it affects the academic performance of the child because the final examination is written by all regardless of you been able to complete your syllabus or not.”
He also pointed out that this flooding issue we are facing as a country poses a lot of threats to school children.
“This is because some electrical wires do fall off as a result of strong winds which ushers the heavy downpour in. After the rains, these wires are no longer visible and school children who are not privileged to have parents pick them up after school will find themselves trucked by such electrification.”
Flooding is also causing most school children especially to fall sick due to choked gutters which breed mosquitoes at the end of the day.
There is no way a child can go to school when he or she is not feeling well.
That is not to say that anyone cannot fall sick but percentage-wise children fall sick more than adults.
The Director General of NADMO, Mr Eric Nana Agyeman Prempeh must help curb this flood situation by putting measures such as fining anyone caught dumping refuse into gutters.
Or even giving a judgment of two years imprisonment to any offender.
The Accra Metropolitan Assembly should give much attention to the issuing of permits to people who want to build.
Because at the end of the day, the builder is not the only one who will be affected as a result of their innocence.
The operation clean your frontage which was introduced by the Accra Regional Minister, Hon. Henry Quartey should be done often and effectively and that will help us as a nation to get rid of our refuse with time.
Flooding affects us as a nation and most especially our school children, and it goes beyond what we are seeing.
Therefore the government should also do everything in its power to help resolve this issue permanently.
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By: Gyetuah Enoch Kwasi, Executive Director for Ghana National Council of Private Schools (GNACOPS)