It is six days since Ghana was brought to her knees by what is without doubt her worst calamity.
Only a few Ghanaians can recall something close to what shook everybody last Wednesday.
For those in their eighties, they might be able to remember the earthquake which shook the foundation of Accra in the 1930s, compelling the relocation of some residents of some areas to new places.
It was a seismological disaster which epicenter records showed was on the McCarthy Hills, with Nyanyano and others suffering devastating ripples.
A portion of the Greater Accra Regional Police Command, the detached semi-wooden structure on the left hand-side as one drives towards the railway station, suffered a big crack on its wall and some portions of the ministries. That was in the 1930s.
Before then, the Gold Coast suffered the plague of 1908. But for these the people of this country have been spared most of the health challenges and natural disasters which other parts of the sub-region and others have witnessed.
What happened last Wednesday put the fear of God in most Ghanaians as they turned to their Creator in prayers.
At the Nima Police Station mosque during the Friday congregational prayers, the Imam struck the right chord when he was sermonising – a critical feature of such weekly prayers.
He queried Muslims who for one reason or the other have forgotten about the elements of Islam, one of which is about cleanliness.
Such persons, he said, do not see anything wrong with throwing all manner of filth in drainages, something their religion abhors as captured in their scriptures. We wish his sermons would change many of the adherents of Islam.
In some parts of Accra, Nima inclusive, the drainage system is an appropriate alternative to garbage containers. And who dare challenge such people who are taking the undue advantage of a somewhat broken-down sanitation inspection regime which used to work efficiently many years ago?
It is early days yet in the rainy season and if the signs are anything to go by, there could be more deluges. Sometimes these signs and even forecasts of meteorologists can be reversed by the Creator who controls all these. We pray that He reverses these scary forecasts because our systems are in disarray and can therefore not withstand the elements as much as they should.
As for the rituals of visiting disaster scenes by politicians at the helm, we think these should be curtailed because people no longer trust them.
Exploiting such visits to showcase their newly- acquired flashy Toyota Four-Wheel vehicles and to make untenable promises only fuel anger among victims who are busy counting their losses at this time.
As we mourn the dead, finding out what really caused the drainage system to fail to contain the volume of rainwater should be unearthed. Such hydrological challenges should be dealt with once and for all by taking them out of the realm of uncouth partisan rhetoric.
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