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�The President was filled with joy that people who a few hours ago were submerged in water have smiles on their faces upon seeing the President. And that is the whole job of government, to bring smiles to the faces of the citizenry� - Koku Anyidoho, Presidential Spokesperson Kofi Portuphy, the boss of NADMO, is living in a dreamland. Nearly three years after being put in charge of the outfit, he has continued to behave as if managing disasters is like walking into your kitchen to scoop a bowl full of rice for your supper. In the beginning, he targeted houses belonging to sympathizers of the opposition, for demolition, and started beating his chest that he was doing very well to rid the capital city of buildings on the waterways. He deliberately left houses belonging to the NDC sympathizers standing on the same waterways. Instead of the man managing disaster, he is always busy, mismanaging disaster and yet he makes the president see him as an efficient disaster manager. In the NDC Manifesto, it was written clearly that when voted to power, an NDC government will rid the nation of filth in a matter of ONE HUNDRED DAYS. They promised that all the filth in Accra would be a thing of the past when they came to power. This was one particular promise which sunk in so much so that the people of Accra voted massively for the NDC. In the run-up to the 2008 general elections, Accra was engulfed with filth and the then NPP government was finding it difficult to surmount the problem. It was during those days that the then Mayor, Adjiri Blankson, introduced the concept of night market. The NDC capitalized on the desperate situation to hoodwink Ghanaians by telling us that they had a trump card and that when they held the reins of power, they would be able to do away with filth in a matter of ONE HUNDRED DAYS. Note my emphasis on the one hundred days. One of the reasons why there has been flooding in Accra is the indiscriminate dumping of refuse into the gutters. Residents have no option but to use those means to do away with their refuse because the containers where they dump their refuses are full to the brim. And so when the rains set in, the waters do not have a way to flow. The promise to get rid of filth in a matter of one hundred days has hit the rocks, leaving the people to suffer. Today, we are talking about the loss of 12 souls in Accra when the city got flooded; but the truth is that many people die through this calamity across the length and breadth of the country. We try to water down the magnanimity of the calamity to make it look as if nothing serious is happening in this country. In fact we act like the proverbial ostrich. Did I hear Koku Anyidoho well? That the flood victims were smiling when they saw the President? And the President was filled with joy when people were mourning their loved ones? Koku, you have not taken time to study Ghanaians very well. Those smiles could have been sarcastic. They might have been telling the President these words: �Aren�t you ashamed of yourself? You promised to do away with filth in the city within ONE HUNDRED DAYS of coming to power and now three years after, look at what is happening to us?� This Koku Anyidoho man is a jester. When people are dying, with their properties worth millions of Ghana cedis lost, you tell Ghanaians that when they saw the president, they all started smiling? Koku, this one will never wash. The people you saw laughing and smiling were all making mockery of the president because they remember the same president visiting them when similar calamities befell them. He has been promising to do something about it but sadly, he keeps reneging on all empty promises. That was why they were making a mockery of him. Koku must learn to read between the lines. Not all smiles are friendly, you know. When you slap a man and he smiles, that doesn�t mean he likes the slap. He may be telling you, in a way, to wait and see. In the case of the �smiling victims of flood� you saw, they may be telling the President to wait and see 2012. When that time comes, you will see different smiles on their faces. The other time, when the President visited Atiwa to assess the destruction caused by the overflowing Birim River, his Deputy Minister of Misinformation, Baba Jamah, told us that immediately the President reached there and saw the huge destruction of properties, he was baffled. He lifted his head, stretched his hand and watched the skies while praying to the Lord of Israel to stop the rains, and the rains stopped immediately. The holy man of God, he who was ordained by Pastor T. B Joshua, shouted at the waters to subside and it came to pass that before the President could get down from the boat he was traveling on, the waters of Birim subsided and the people glorified the Lord God Almighty, He who delivered Israel from the wicked rule of Pharaoh. And it came to pass in those same self days that the President charged the regional minister to ban galamsey operators from working along the banks of the river Birim. The galamsey operators went back to work along the banks of River Birim even before the President got to Suhum after leaving Atiwa. And so as it stands now, we are waiting for next year when the rains will come and Atiwa people will mourn the dead while the President sits there in the castle drinking his tea, as usual. Oh, Ghana politics! Gradually, the whole thing is becoming a yearly ritual. Anytime the rains start to fall, people brace themselves for the worst scenario. The difference is that the number of people who die either increases or decreases. After the calamity, the President will don his rain coat and visit the affected areas to express his disgust and condolences to bereaved families. He will thank NADMO for a job well done and go on to advice the people against indiscriminate building on waterways. He will then instruct the mayor to compile a list of those affected and send it to the office of NADMO for them to distribute rice, plastic cups, buckets and mats. It ends there until another year when the process would be replicated. We are not serious. In 1971, the late Professor Kofi Abrefa Busia, the former Prime Minister of Ghana, commissioned an expert to draw a comprehensive underground drainage system so that anytime rain falls in Accra, the underground system will absorb the rain water and drain it into the sea. The blue print is somewhere in the archives of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly. Governments after governments have failed to go into the archives to retrieve the blueprint and make the dream of the late Prime Minister come true. In view of the perennial flooding in Accra, we must put politics aside and see reason. The fact that the NDC promised to do away with filth in the city within one hundred days but woefully failed to deliver, doesn�t mean we should resign ourselves to fate. We need to pick up the pieces and move forward to a different direction. The time has come for us to pay for the disposal of our refuse instead of throwing them into the gutters. It was President Mills who told Ghanaians that all the good things that were initiated by the Kufour regime would be continued by his government. We all saw how the Odaw River, which lies at the centre of Accra, was being drilled. That job has been stopped for reasons best known to the powers that be. We need to re-engage the contractor to go back to site and begin work. That river must be fenced to keep people away from dumping refuse into it. If the people of London could maintain River Thames which lies at the heart of the city, I see no reason why we could not do same to river Odaw. The deliberate cultivation of filth in Accra will not do anyone any good. All we need to do is to change our attitudes. We cannot simply remain as we are and expect tourists to come. Our hospitality alone cannot bring these tourists to our shores. Sometimes, whenever I visit Agbogbloshie or Sodom and Gomorrah, I feel that we as a people are committing crime against humanity. The filth, coupled with the unacceptable human habitat makes me feel ashamed as a Ghanaian. The rumour mill had it that when President Barrack Obama came to Ghana and saw the Sodom and Gomorrah slums, he asked what was being done there and president Mills, who was sitting by him, said that place was a zoo (sic!!). And these are the people politicians do not hesitate to go to, to seek for their votes to rule the nation. More than five decades after attaining independence, this is how far we have reached. Oh, land of our death, we pledge to thee!!!