When torrential rains submerged large parts of Accra on June 29, the floods exposed something deeper than blocked drains. They exposed the widening gap between the city we have and the city we want to build. Ghana has over the years played political football with the perennial floods, but these unprecedented rains are unlike anything we’ve witnessed and give us a rude awakening to a new reality that is going to confront us.
The torrential rains that overwhelmed old cities such as Circle, Alajo, Kaneshie, Adabraka, Achimota, Weija, Madina, Adenta, Lapaz, and Spintex show a spread wide enough to make clear this was not a localised drainage failure but a citywide one. The devastation left in its wake is more severe than anything in recent memory. One thing is certain: this will not be the last flood, and without decisive action, it will get worse in subsequent years.
While politicians play the blame game and jostle to build political capital from the moment, it is more useful to elevate the discussion of how we actually mitigate future floods. Much of the public conversation has settled on a familiar villain: the dumping of refuse into open sewers. I agree this is a factor. But it is only a small fraction of a much bigger problem, and treating it as the whole story lets everyone off the hook too easily.
The President’s Response
President John Dramani Mahama, responding to the floods, has in addition to announcement of relief provisions proposed building a new city to decongest central Accra, with government departments relocated out of the current Central Business District (CBD). By his own account, this is not a quick fix but an approximate 20-year undertaking, with technical designs still being worked out before any land is demarcated for residential, commercial, or institutional use.
The Philippines offers a useful, still-unfolding case study in managing exactly this kind of expectation. New Clark City, planned from 2012 as a resilient new metropolis north of Manila, was explicitly conceived to decongest the capital by relocating government functions and residents onto higher, safer ground. Fourteen years on, its road network is still under 40 percent complete and its national government administrative center only recently broke ground. None of this means the project has failed. Long-horizon infrastructure genuinely takes this long everywhere. But it is a clear signal that a new city cannot be the thing standing between residents and relief from the next flood; it arrives on its own long timeline, and the old city needs its own, much shorter one running alongside it. A new city can be a genuine long-term asset without being the near-term flood solution. Accra should plan for both truths at once, and communicate that honestly to residents now rather than let expectations drift ahead of the timeline.
The realities of the execution timeline is worth considering, not as a criticism of the vision, but as a reason to run two tracks at once. A 20-year horizon for a new city means residents need relief on a much shorter timeline than that. The most useful complement to the President’s long-term vision is an immediate, parallel programme to modernise the city we already have — so that when the new city does arrive, it inherits a well-functioning Accra rather than a deferred problem.
This raises real opportunities, but also real questions. Accra is overcrowded; and that overcrowding strains infrastructure and multiplies waste. But the operative question is not simply “where do we build next”? It is how we transition an old, organically grown city into a modern one that can sustain a growing population! Posed to developers, both public and private, that question opens a pathway that can serve the President’s long-term vision while modernising the city we’re standing in right now. What we should not do is throw money at symptoms without first diagnosing the underlying disease.
Location, Location, Location
If a new city is coming, the single most consequential question is: where? Everything else follows from it:
There is little doubt a new CBD is needed. The government has already invested heavily in the current one, so an important part of the plan; one I’m confident the technical teams are already considering is what happens to those buildings once departments relocate. Answering that well ensures the new city adds capacity rather than simply shifting the same challenges to a new address.
A Technical Plan for the City We Already Have
While the cleanup from this year’s floods continues, government should be preparing for next year’s floods with a concrete technical plan. One that can be executed in a fraction of the time a new city will take.
1. Reconcile the Land Registry with an As-Built Plan
The most basic obstacle to fixing Accra is that nobody fully agrees on what has actually been built where. A search on the same property at the Lands Commission and at the Town and Country Planning Department routinely produces two different pictures. This is not a paperwork inconvenience! It is the reason buildings have gone up on natural water pathways and disrupted drainage infrastructure that was designed decades ago. It is impossible to enforce a plan that doesn’t match reality on the ground.
Rwanda faced a similar problem in Kigali in the 2000s: unplanned settlements sat on drainage corridors and wetlands, and property records didn’t reflect what had actually been built. Kigali’s response was to commission a comprehensive land-use and satellite survey before any resettlement or demolition began, so that decisions were based on verified ground truth rather than outdated maps. Accra needs the same discipline: Government must commission its surveyors and town planners to produce a single, authoritative “As-Built” plan for the city before a single demolition exercise is carried out. As the name suggests, “As-built” plans is the actual documentation representing infrastructure and buildings as they physically exist on the ground rather than how they were originally conceived. Demolishing structures without this baseline risks repeating the very disorder we’re trying to fix.
2. Harmonise the As-Built Plan with Infrastructure and Environmental Data
Once an As-Built plan exists, it must be harmonised with road and infrastructure layouts, geological surveys, and Environmental Protection Agency data. These bodies currently work in silos. A single integrated plan ensures that where a road is widened, a drain is also resized to match, rather than infrastructure upgrades happening piecemeal and out of sync with each other, which is a large part of why Accra’s drainage has fallen so far behind its growth.
3. Size Drainage and Roads to the Plan, Not to Convenience
An As-Built plan tells government what type of roads and what size of drainage a given community actually needs, based on real population density — not on whatever budget or contractor happens to be available that year. Singapore’s Public Utilities Board offers a useful comparator: its drainage master plan is revised on a rolling basis against actual land-use and rainfall data, rather than being fixed once and left untouched for decades. Accra’s drainage plan should work the same way; treated as a living document updated against real usage, not a static blueprint from the 1958 city plan.
4. Decentralise Waste Collection, Keep Treatment Centralised
Waste management deserves a more surgical look than it currently gets. I favour a disintegrated system: large operators like Zoomlion should handle treatment and disposal at scale, where their infrastructure investment makes sense, but collection sits with the communities themselves, organised at the Assembly level. Community-based collection creates local jobs and, just as importantly, creates a shorter, more visible accountability chain: when the people collecting your refuse live on your street, service failures are harder to ignore and easier to trace back to a specific point of failure, rather than disappearing into a single distant company’s system-wide problem.
5. Build Functional Cities, Not Passive Residential Zones
Too often, we treat our homes as islands within the city rather than as part of it. In cities like Kigali and Singapore, residents pay municipal levies that visibly fund local services, enforcement of city regulations is transparent and largely insulated from political interference, and residents are consulted before new developments break ground nearby. A functional city is one where residents are active participants in its administration, not passive recipients of whatever gets built around them. Giving residents a genuine voice in decisions and enforcement is what makes regulations stick. Compliance follows naturally when people feel some ownership of the rules, rather than having them imposed from a distance.
6. Develop and maintain a continuity database for Accra.
None of the city implementation and management plans works without actionable data. It is imperative to maintain a continuously updated digital record of the city’s infrastructure, maintenance history, flood incidents, sensor data, planning decisions, and city council minutes and programmes. Reviving the Ghana Post Digital Address system and overlaying it onto this record would give it real, everyday utility — supporting property identification, approved modifications, and tax participation, not just parcel delivery. Bringing data from all these agencies into a single, shared database builds a knowledge base that keeps improving on itself: every flood, every disaster, every planning decision feeds directly into how the city plans and builds next, rather than being filed away and forgotten once the immediate crisis passes.
Two Visions, One Foundation
Mr. President’s vision for a new city is a laudable one, and it deserves the careful, well-resourced planning process that a project of this scale requires. Towns are erupting around Accra almost daily, and the city’s rapid growth has put enormous strain on infrastructure that was never designed to carry this much weight — which is exactly why the vision matters.
Technical institutions including the Ghana Real Estate Developers Association (GREDA) working alongside government technocrats, are well placed to produce a rigorous blueprint that serves both ambitions at once; realising the President’s vision for a new city, while modernisingthe one we already have. Ghana does not have to choose between the two, and pursuing both together gives each a far better chance of succeeding. A well-modernised Accra is the strongest possible foundation for the new city to build on. It is important to emphasize that cities are not transformed by blueprints alone. Disasters will inevitably strike from time to time; but resilient cities rebound on the back of well-developed data-driven continuity plans that continuously improve the spaces people already call home!
Author:
Profile of Author:
Kojo Ansah Mensah is a business executive, with over fifteen years of leadership experience across Ghana and Nigeria, serving as CEO of JonahCapital Nigeria Limited and Mobus Property Development. Since 2012, he has led real estate and hospitality investments in Abuja and Accra totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, helping create hundreds of jobs, and continues to champion private-sector investment, sustainable urban development, and economic cooperation between Ghana and Nigeria.
Email: [email protected] / [email protected]
