"The Three Little Pigs"

before the collapse

Depending on which local media reports from Ghana you’ve accessed in the past week, a 4, 5 or 6 storey building partly being used as a shopping mall crushed to pulp leaving rubble that suggests, nay definitely smacks of substandard construction work. 

Having personally experienced the numbing consequences of the “priceless” handiwork of the most celebrated estates company in Ghana with a record of almost yearly awards for industry excellence, I was truely upset by the incident.

Pickaxes, shovels, spades, cranes and bare hands were deployed quickly at the scene of the disaster for the rescue operation. Aside the bare hands our tools for the rescue operation sent shivers down my spine as I imagined the possibility of victims being gored in the eye, in the sides, or crushed by the very same rescue tools. The Israelis must have felt the same. A day after the disaster, 18 of them were flown in to our aid armed with sniffer dogs and other “special equipment”. 

Thankfully 50 victims of the disaster had already been removed from the rubble safely by the time they got in. Personnel from almost all the security agencies were at hand supported by probably all the ambulances and operational stretchers, private and public in the city. Concerned citizens bought sachet water and threw them into the wreckage for the trapped, screaming and thirsty victims. 

The incident happened Wednesday November 7 before 10am and going by the claim of the shop owners that business was yet to begin that day and that only about 52 workers were likely to be in the building at the time, the search for survivors should have ended on the same day. At the last count on Monday 12, about 85 people out of which 14 have been pronounced dead, had been taken from the wreckage and the search is only now winding down.   

Elsewhere, on the eve of the recent US presidential election Superstorm Sandy hit the US. It wasn’t pretty - about 2 million people were reported with no electricity and some 40, 000 New Yorkers faced evacuation - and I thought the election would be postponed or something. I was wrong, Sandy did not happen in my backyard. I am pretty certain the events of Wednesday November 7 would have halted our elections slated for December. But off course I couldn’t possibly be suggesting we could be measured by the US’s capacity to weather the storms (no pun intended); just the sobering realization that we aren’t ready for just about anything, death being the exception.

Yesterday the subject matter for Talking Point, a current affairs discussion program on Ghana Television was off course the national disaster that brought the election campaigns to a halt, albeit temporarily. A panelist was saying that there is no authority that registers private construction firms/ contractors in Ghana and that must be corrected. Another suggested the need to determine the chain of command in rescue operations as we were confronted with in the current incident. Yet another cautioned against apportioning blame until it becomes clear what contributed to the disaster. The discussion was filled with many “we have tos” and “we try tos”. 

The metropolitan boss says the building had no permit and practitioners in the construction industry are suggesting that the building that crushed seems to have been the product of inferior materials in the hands of unqualified builders.  The president has said that those culpable in this incident will face the music but beyond that, it seems to me the real culprit is the state. 

Where is the institutional framework that ensures such buildings never come into being in the first place; that defines and ensures minimum standards in the construction industry; that monitors and penalizes substandard work; that ensures redress for citizens who suffer the ills of industry players and indeed that ensures that those who receive awards for excellence do indeed meet the standards of quality? This calls for deep reflection; the kind that results from the self-assessment of a humbled people. 

So to the presidential candidates at the next debate and particularly the one who claims his vision is to get (state) institutions to work again: How will your government strengthen the institutional framework for disaster management in Ghana? While you think about it, please be advised to refrain from suggesting that your vice presidential candidate will head an institution  to be set up to deal with it. That solution has been spent, thank you.