Tema, Jan. 30, - The Greater
Regional Director of the National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO) says
there is the need to deal with potentially disastrous situations before they break forth on us.
“As a nation we need to wake up
to certain realities. We shouldn’t be a nation that would wait for disasters to
happen before we see what could be done to help the situations,” he said.
Mr. Archibald Cobbina said this
during a familiarization tour of four blocks of the Kaizer Flats in Tema
Community Four, which have been earmarked for demolition due to their perceived
disaster prone nature.
Mr. Cobbina said it was essential
that something was done to protect the lives of the people who lived in the affected
buildings in their own interest, adding that “almost all the buildings in the
Kaizer Flats have serious cracks; all the irons are showing; they are all
rusty, and it is not good for human habitation.”
He said, “We will not throw
people out on the streets. We have what we call safe havens so that those who
genuinely may not have made alternative arrangements may have places to go
to. We have sent people around to look
at places nearby for them to settle for a couple of days.”
The Presidential Spokesperson on
Infrastructure, Mr. Richard Asante Yeboah, observed the Kaizer Flats were
disasters waiting to happen.
“These are death traps; these are
situations which if not curbed now would make us lose a good number of people,”
he said.
He added that, “There have been
other disasters we saw and allowed to happened, but this government was
determined to prevent such things from occurring.”
The Assembly Member for
Horticulture Electoral Area, which houses the Kaizer Flats, Mr Richard Anning, observed that there were
residents who did not know where they were moving to, with some not even having
means of transportation so “any assistance they could give us to move
peacefully before the Thursday will be appreciated.”
He said there were other blocks
which were not different from the four condemned, and therefore suspected that
the Tema Development Company(TDC) had a hidden agenda concerning the other
blocks.
He said, “I am begging them, we
have 401 to 415 flats. If you look at the twin flats for instance, they have
one staircase and one is considered dangerous and the other declared safe. If
one is demolished, how will people on the other flat get to their rooms? So the
earlier they make their plans known to us, the better.”
He asked TDC to go through the
records to determine who genuinely never benefited from the compensation
packages they gave some years ago and compensate them as they have agreed to
vacate the facilities.
Mr. Isaac Lomotey, the
Spokesperson for the affected residents, indicated that about 80 per cent of
them did not have places to go to “but they would move out of their rooms, may
be they might find spaces around the flats to rest their tired bodies.”
Criticizing the inability of the authorities
to provide alternative accommodations for them, he said, “They should treat all
persons equally, for we are all Ghanaians. As such, if you want to take over
your facility, you should look for alternatives for them.”
Engineers had declared Blocks
407, 408, 410 and 415 in the Kaizer Flats, Tema unsafe for human settlement due
to their dilapidated nature and therefore were to be demolished.
In all 187 residents, made up of
53 children and 134 adults, were to vacate the flats by the 1st February 2018
according to a court order.
GNA
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