Ghana News
Accra’s Floods Expose Deeper Crisis of Governability, Analyst Argues
Every rainy season, images of submerged vehicles, stranded commuters, and plastic-choked drains flood Ghanaian social media. The familiar narrative follows: poor drainage, inadequate infrastructure, climate change, and yet another call for desilting exercises.
But a growing chorus of urban analysts and researchers argues that this explanation, while not false, is dangerously incomplete. The real crisis, they contend, is not engineering—it is governability.
In a recent analytical essay titled “Accra and the Future Now Emerging Across Urban Africa,” writer Richard Dablah argues that Accra’s recurrent flooding reveals a widening gap between the speed of urban transformation and the capacity of institutions to manage it. Decades of cleanup campaigns, desilting exercises, and donor-funded resilience projects have failed to produce lasting resolution, he writes, because the city has entered a phase where informality, improvisation, and distributed adaptation have become the “hidden operating system” of metropolitan survival.
“The city evolves faster than the governing logic designed to manage it,” Dablah writes.
His diagnosis echoes a growing body of academic research. In a study published in April 2025, urban planning scholars Stephen Appiah Takyi and Owusu Amponsah surveyed 100 households in flood-prone areas of Accra, including Kaneshie, Adabraka, and Kwame Nkrumah Circle.
Their finding was stark: 52 percent of residents attributed flooding to weak enforcement of land use regulations, while only 8 percent blamed changes in rainfall patterns. Analysis of recorded flood and rainfall data found no correlation between increased rainfall and flooding—in 2017, for example, rainfall decreased while flooding increased.
Political Ecology, Not Climate Alone
Dr. Albert A. Arhin, a development planner and research fellow at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology’s Bureau of Integrated Rural Development, has made a similar argument.
In an opinion piece published by Graphic Online in July 2025, he wrote that Accra’s floods are “less about global warming and climate change and more about political ecology—how power, planning and privilege shape who suffers and why.”
Arhin points to selective enforcement as a core driver. “Bulldozers are quick to demolish the kiosks of the poor, but eerily silent when luxury estates encroach on floodplains,” he wrote. Urban planning decisions, he argued, are routinely undermined by political interference, and enforcement agencies remain systematically under-resourced.
“When developers know they can grease the system to override technical advice,” Arhin asked, “what incentive remains to follow the rules?”
Research conducted by Josephine Agbeko and Daniel Shtob of Michigan Technological University, published in April 2026 through the Global Disaster Preparedness Center, reached a similar conclusion.
After 40 in-depth interviews with municipal leaders, community leaders, and residents in four at-risk informal settlements, the researchers found that Accra’s dominant flood response “centers on technological and infrastructural solutions and largely omits community-engaged, participatory planning and governance, often to the detriment of project efficacy”.
Historical Planning Failures
The roots of today’s crisis run deep. According to a 2024 policy analysis published by The Ghana Report, the Town and Country Planning Division prepared a plan for Accra in 1958 that designated low-lying areas along the Odaw River for public open space, agriculture, and green belt specifically to conserve flood-prone areas. Decades later, hundreds of acres of those designated spaces have been converted into building plots.
In 1973, a Drainage Committee appointed by the National Liberation Council recommended prohibiting construction within 100 feet on either bank of major drainage channels. Those recommendations were never enforced. In 1992, the Strategic Plan for the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area included thematic maps on seven drainage basins and flood-prone areas, but it “remained on the shelf,” the analysis noted.
More recently, in July 2025, Ghana’s Ministry of Local Government, Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs held a validation workshop for a revised National Urban Policy Monitoring and Evaluation Framework, supported by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. The framework is designed to track inputs, activities, outputs, and long-term outcomes for urban planning, and includes plans for an Urban Observatory to support continuous monitoring and reporting.
Whether this framework will succeed where previous efforts have failed remains an open question. The same workshop also produced a draft Capacity Needs Assessment Report identifying “institutional gaps in staffing, logistics, technical capabilities, and coordination mechanisms across urban governance actors”.
Informality as Adaptation
Dablah’s essay situates Accra’s governance crisis within a broader African urban reality. He argues that informality has ceased to represent a temporary deviation from urban order and has instead become the “hidden operating system” of metropolitan survival.
Academic research supports this view. A 2025 study by Dr. Isaac Addo of the University of Ghana, published in the volume “Intersectionality and the City,” examined low-income workers at Accra’s Airport City—a “world-class enclave” of multinational businesses. Despite being employed in a space designed for high-income transients, these workers earn low wages and face barriers to accessing basic necessities. Their response has been to “common” the urban enclave, producing liminal spaces that blur the boundary between formality and informality through informal food vending and other adaptive strategies.
Dablah argues that this distributed adaptation—informal transport networks absorbing mobility pressures, informal settlements absorbing demographic expansion, plastic sachets compensating for uneven water access, private generators filling energy gaps—has become the mechanism through which Accra functions.
“Nothing fully collapses,” he writes. “Yet nothing fully resolves either.”
Dr. Onyanta Adama-Ajonye, a researcher at Stockholm University whose work focuses on urban governance and service delivery in African cities, is currently leading a project examining how informal waste workers in Accra, Lagos, and Maputo keep materials in circulation through improvised practices. Her research explores how new circular economy policies encounter pre-existing informal systems—often with unintended consequences for marginalized groups.
The Way Forward
Researchers and policy analysts have offered concrete recommendations. Takyi and Amponsah call for strict enforcement of buffer regulations, collaboration between planning authorities and the judiciary, and the adoption of green infrastructure such as rain gardens, permeable pavement, and rain harvesting systems. They also suggest introducing the “polluter pays principle” in city management, requiring those who encroach on wetlands or dispose of waste indiscriminately to bear the cost of environmental degradation—a practice already applied in cities such as Barcelona and Helsinki.
The 2024 policy analysis from The Ghana Report proposed establishing an Accra Region Conservation Authority or empowering the existing Densu Basin Board to undertake storm water management across entire drainage basins rather than within fragmented local government jurisdictions.
The author also called for a massive public awareness and education programme “directed towards attitude change that would enable people to understand flood problems, and to see themselves as being part, not only of the problem, but also of the solution”.
Arhin, the KNUST research fellow, offered a blunter assessment.
“These are not technical challenges—they are political choices,” he wrote. “Until we tackle the power dynamics behind who builds where and who is held accountable, no amount of rainfall prediction models or climate resilience strategies will save Accra from its next inundation”.
For Dablah, the stakes extend beyond Accra. He argues that the pressures converging inside African cities—climate instability, demographic compression, fragmented governance, adaptive informality—increasingly resemble pressures emerging globally.
“The future may arrive unevenly,” he writes. “But it rarely arrives only once.”
As Ghana invests over $200 million in the Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development (GARID) project and other interventions, the question is whether these investments will address the underlying governance crisis or simply build more infrastructure atop a dysfunctional system.
The floodwaters, Dablah suggests, will reveal the answer.
President John Dramani Mahama has challenged thousands of church delegates gathered in Ghana’s capital to measure the success of their global congress not by the eloquence of its sermons, but by the lives they transform after the final prayer is said.
“The lasting story of this conference, this congress, will be written in the lives that we touch after the closing prayer,” Mahama told more than 10,000 participants at the opening ceremony of the 10th Triennial Congress of the World Assemblies of God Fellowship on Wednesday, October 14, 2026.
The president urged delegates to return to their home countries with concrete plans to serve their communities — mentoring young people, supporting schools, strengthening health ministries and standing beside congregations serving under difficult conditions.
Faith Must Be Tangible
Mahama argued that faith becomes real only when it meets human need. He offered a vivid portrait of what practical Christianity looks like: a hungry child receiving a meal, a patient treated with compassion, a young person acquiring a skill, a widow finding companionship, and a struggling family receiving support from its community.
He called on the church to give greater attention to the relationship between preaching the gospel and serving people in practical ways, saying the two must not be separated.
“Spiritual authority entails a duty of care,” the president said, stressing that churches must provide safe environments for children and vulnerable people. He warned that spiritual leadership carries a responsibility to protect the trust placed in it through responsible conduct.
A Warning on Youth and Technology
Turning to youth development, Mahama acknowledged that young people today are growing up in a world of extraordinary opportunity, but also considerable pressure. Technology, he said, connects young people across continents while simultaneously exposing them to constant comparisons, misinformation and competing expectations about who they should become.
He urged churches and families to create environments where young people can ask questions freely, receive guidance, develop their abilities and take on meaningful responsibilities. Delegates, he said, should mentor young people by listening to them, offering opportunities for service and modelling integrity.
The president also called on the church to recognise the contributions of women of faith, saying their wisdom, talents and leadership deserve full recognition.
A Call for Global Solidarity
Addressing the global nature of the fellowship, Mahama expressed hope that members with greater resources would find ways to support those with fewer. The fellowship, he said, would grow stronger when its members shared their gifts and stood with one another through difficult times.
He also spoke directly to the responsibility of public office, saying those entrusted with power had a particular duty to serve with humility, honesty and integrity. Faith, he added, should deepen respect for citizens and concern for those whose voices are least likely to reach the centres of power.
Historic Honour for a Pentecostal President
At the ceremony, the World Assemblies of God Fellowship presented Mahama with its maiden Global Leadership Excellence and Trailblazer Award. The citation described him as the first member of the Assemblies of God worldwide to become president of a country — a milestone for the denomination.
Organisers also presented him with a Bible and urged him to allow the Word of God to guide his leadership.
The fellowship honoured First Lady Mrs. Lordina Mahama for her work supporting vulnerable people through her compassion ministry.
Former Malawian President Dr. Lazarus Chakwera also received the Global Leadership Excellence Award. His citation described him as the second member of the denomination — and the first minister of the gospel within the fellowship — to become president of a country.
Prayers for Wisdom and Redistribution
Following the awards, general superintendents and Ghanaian church leaders gathered around Mahama to pray for him. The prayer leader, Reverend Dominic Yeo, the fellowship’s Global Chairman, asked God to grant the president “divine wisdom” and prayed for the continuation of what he described as a reformation agenda.
He also prayed for “a redistribution of wealth throughout this nation so that all Ghanaians will be blessed,” a prayer that resonated beyond the sanctuary walls in a country where economic inequality remains a pressing concern.
A Global Gathering in Accra
The 10th Triennial Congress has drawn more than 10,000 participants to Accra, making it one of the largest Pentecostal gatherings on the continent this year. The event brings together delegates from across the global fellowship, reflecting the denomination’s growing presence in Africa and beyond.
For Mahama, however, the congress’s true significance will not be found in its attendance figures or its ceremonies — but in what delegates do once they return home.
“Faith becomes tangible,” he said, “when a hungry child receives a meal, a patient is treated with compassion, a young person acquires a skill, a widow finds companionship and a struggling family receives support from its community.”
The closing prayer, it seems, is only the beginning.
Gamal Gorkeh Nkrumah, the journalist, writer, and intellectual son of Ghana’s founding president, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, has died in Cairo, Egypt, following a prolonged illness. He was 67.
The Nkrumah family announced his passing in a statement released Tuesday, describing it as “a profound loss not only to our family and loved ones, but also to the wider community of friends, colleagues and readers who valued his insight, humanity and unwavering engagement with the great questions of our time.”
According to the family, Gamal Nkrumah passed away peacefully after receiving care at a rehabilitation centre, where he had been recovering from a stroke.
A Life of Intellectual Engagement
Born in 1958, Gamal Nkrumah carved out a distinct identity as a newspaper journalist and commentator, dedicating his voice and intellect to examining the political, social, and cultural forces shaping Africa and the wider world.
Throughout his life, the family said, he remained “deeply committed to the ideals of justice, human dignity, African unity and international solidarity.”
Described as a man of “profound intellectual curiosity, independence of thought and quiet conviction,” Gamal carried forward the legacy of his father in his own distinctive way, while building a reputation firmly grounded in his own principles and achievements.
His passing marks the loss of a respected voice in African journalism and intellectual life, one whose work spanned continents and engaged deeply with the pressing issues of his time.
A Family in Mourning
Gamal was one of the acknowledged children of Kwame Nkrumah and Fathia Nkrumah. He is survived by his siblings: Samia Nkrumah (born 1960), a politician and former leader of the Convention People’s Party (CPP); Dr. Francis Nkrumah (born 1962), a paediatrician; and Sekou Nkrumah (born 1964), a politician and photographer.
The Nkrumah family remembered Gamal “with immense love, gratitude and pride,” stating that “his wisdom, kindness and devotion to the values he held dear will remain an enduring source of inspiration.”
Gratitude and Requests for Privacy
In their statement, the family expressed heartfelt appreciation to all those who stood with Gamal throughout his illness, particularly the medical professionals and caregivers in Cairo who provided him with care and dignity.
They also extended “deepest thanks” to the governments and people of his two countries, Egypt and Ghana, for their generous support.
The family has kindly requested privacy as it mourns this deeply personal loss. Details concerning memorial arrangements and opportunities to pay tribute to his life and legacy will be communicated in due course.
“May he rest in eternal peace,” the statement concluded.
Ghana News
Ohio Court Orders Ghanaian Care Worker to Repay $53,278 After Workers’ Compensation Fraud Conviction
Betty Boateng, 50, of Columbus, pleaded guilty to a fifth-degree felony after investigators found she collected disability benefits while working for two in-home care employers
A US-based Ghanaian woman has been ordered to repay more than $53,000 to the state of Ohio after admitting she collected workers’ compensation disability benefits while simultaneously holding paid jobs, authorities announced.
Betty Boateng, 50, of Columbus, pleaded guilty to one count of Workers’ Compensation Fraud, a fifth-degree felony, following an investigation by the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation (BWC) Special Investigations Department, the agency said in a news release dated October 9, 2026.
Investigators found that Boateng “knowingly and with fraudulent intent returned to work for two different employers during periods when she was receiving BWC disability benefits to which she was not entitled.”
Evidence gathered during the probe showed she earned wages while continuing to accept disability checks, resulting in improper payments totaling $53,278.40.
Sentencing in Franklin County
On September 23, 2026, a judge in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas accepted Boateng’s guilty plea and proceeded directly to sentencing, ordering:
- A 12-month suspended sentence
- 60 months of community control
- Mandatory reporting requirements
- Restitution of $53,278.40 to the Ohio BWC
- Waiver of fines, with court costs imposed
The case centered on Boateng’s work providing non-medical in-home care services for multiple employers, work she performed while receiving disability benefits she was not entitled to.
“Fraud Hurts Honest Workers”
BWC Administrator Stephanie McCloud said the agency remains committed to protecting the state’s workers’ compensation fund.
“Fraud against the workers’ compensation system hurts honest Ohio workers and employers,” McCloud said. “We are committed to holding accountable those who abuse the system and ensuring that funds remain available for individuals truly in need.”
The BWC urged anyone who knows of or suspects workers’ compensation fraud to contact its Special Investigations Department at 1-800-OHIO-BWC.
A Cautionary Tale for the Diaspora
The conviction adds to a growing list of cases involving Ghanaian nationals abroad facing fraud-related charges in the United States. Ghanaian communities in the US — particularly in cities such as Columbus, which has a sizable Ghanaian population — have increasingly been urged to understand the strict compliance rules attached to public benefit programs.
Workers’ compensation fraud in Ohio can be prosecuted as a felony depending on the amount involved, and convictions typically require full restitution in addition to any criminal penalties.
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