You know, the moment the clouds start getting dark over Accra, everyone in Alajo and Abofu starts panicking. It’s like a curse. This week was just a nightmare. It rained so hard, and within minutes, the main big gutter between Abofu and Alajo just gave up. It couldn’t hold the water at all. It overflowed and turned the whole place into a sea. A dirty, fast-moving sea.
If you walk down there right now, the place just looks and smells terrible. It smells like soak-away, mud, and rotten trash. Everything is ruined. People have lost their homes, their shops, everything. But the worst part of it all is that we lost human beings this time. Some people actually drowned because the current was too strong. Imagine just trying to get home and the water sweeps you away. People lost their cattle, their cars got submerged, and some cars were even carried away like empty plastic bottles. It’s so heartbreaking.
And the crazy thing is, even while the water was rushing and dangerous, you could see young guys and girls jumping inside. It was so scary to watch because one wrong foot and the water would take you. But they were desperate. They were trying to catch their things—like fridges, TVs, or bags of clothes floating away. When you lose everything you’ve worked for, you don’t even think about the danger anymore, you just jump in to save what you can.
But you see, when the water finally started going down, that’s when you see the real problem. The whole place is just covered in garbage. Pure trash. Millions of plastic bottles, takeaway boxes, black polythene bags, just stuck everywhere—on people’s roofs, inside the gates, tangled in fences. It’s disgusting. And that is exactly why the water can’t flow. People are just dumping trash into the gutters anytime it rains, thinking the water will carry it away. Well, it carried it away, but it brought it right back into our bedrooms.
Honestly, everyone on the street is just furious right now. If you talk to anyone in Alajo, they are shouting. People are tired of this happening every single year. Every single year we go through the same thing, we talk about the same bad drainage, and nothing changes. It’s the same old story. People are blaming their neighbors for throwing refuse into the waterways, which is true, we really need to stop that self-destruction. But people are also completely fed up with the authorities.
The government and the city council only know how to show up when the damage is already done. They will come with cameras, wear big rainboots, look sad, and give out a few mattresses and bags of rice. Then they disappear until next year. Nobody wants their rice anymore! What the people here actually want is for the government to bring the big machines and properly dig out the drains. Dredge the gutters so they are deep enough to hold the rain. And they need to arrest people who dump trash inside. If they don’t do something real this time, the next rain is going to wash the whole community away, and we are just tired of living in fear every time the sky turns grey.
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