New Capital City To Be Built From The Scratch

The Ghana Report has picked up bits and pieces of information that suggest the political community is nursing the idea of constructing a modern Capital City for Ghana on fallow lands.

If this is concretized, it will be the third time Ghana would have moved its capital. Cape Coast in the Central region was the capital of the then Gold Coast before Accra took over under the new name Ghana following independence from colonial rule in 1957.

If you ask any individual politician or economist about the plan to build a new city, they are most likely to tell you that would be an unwise move because of the dire economic challenges Ghana is facing. Therefore, the creation of a new national capital city derives confidence from aggregations under previous regimes.

Equity in development has guided almost all political regimes in Ghana, hence the dispersal of projects to all parts of the country. The belief in the possibility of a new city is based on the assumption that should the projects allocated to various parts of the country be concentrated on one location, that could have been a city.

Transport, medical, energy, utilities, housing, industrial, business, and sports infrastructure that have found a place in Ghana over the last fifteen years are indices of a capable nation that can deliver and disprove the skeptics.

Oti, the region carved out of the Volta region is gaining the spotlight as the possible location of the new capital. The region has basics such as mountains, other highlands, surface water, and a massive vegetative cover.

Given the complement of modern amenities such as airports, hospitals, shopping malls, bus tramps, trains, underground tunnels, recreational parks, and hotels, conditions necessary for a first-class city could be met. That was how Nigeria configured the gated city of Abuja with the help of a Japanese architect.

Creation of a new Capital City as a means of doing the right things from the word go, and escaping the demerits of existing cosmopolitans like Accra, Kumasi, Tamale, and Sekondi-Takoradi is a card on the table of the political parties in Ghana.

The one area in this configuration that hangs loose is the handle and that requires the crusaders’ personal bravery, the parliamentary majority for the seal by the law-making body, and the unleashing of external donors, to start the ambitious project.