President John Dramani Mahama on July 8 chaired a National Security Council meeting on the recent floods that affected seven regions of the country.
At the meeting, the President was briefed by the Head of the Post-Flood Mitigation Taskforce, Brigadier Okae-Yeboah and leaders of the subcommittees.
In his remarks, he underscored the importance of the meeting, saying “In the aftermath of the floods that affected a lot of the southern coastal part of our country, I deemed it necessary for us to have a national security meeting to discuss the issues arising out of that natural disaster.”
According to him, although flooding is a natural occurrence, its effect can be reduced.
“We might not be able to completely eliminate flooding because it’s a natural disaster that happens not only in our part of the world, it happens in other areas. But we can minimize it and make its effect less disastrous like what happened.
“In this particular case, all countries from Gabon to Cote d’Ivoire reported flooding and some loss of lives, some much higher than us. And like we Christians say in everything, we give thanks and we hope that we should be able to work so that we ameliorate the difficulty that people are suffering.
“It has become a recurring incident, but of course this was far worse than any that we have seen, because of the vagaries of climate change. It looks like increasingly every year the rainfall is getting heavier and it means that we have to see what mitigation measures to put in place. And so aside from that too, the pressures of urbanization, Accra being the capital, it is expanding at a very alarming rate. And the desire for land to build is increasingly making people encroach into areas that were formerly reserved for the passage of water and the containment of water,” he said.
President Mahama noted that although a flood mitigation taskforce was set up last year, the work they did was limited.
“Of course we set up a task force before the incident occurred. They did some limited work in terms of dredging some of the waterways, but I mean the amount of rainfall that fell this time, it was very difficult to contain. Happily, the Minister of Finance has released some money from the contingency fund for us to be able to finance the mitigation measures going forward,” the President said.
