Over 2,000 families will be forced to evacuate their houses in Gbawe Gonse in the Weija Gbawe Municipality of the Greater Accra Region to pave the way for a demolition exercise to save the Weija Dam.
The order was enforced by the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL).
There are several houses that have been earmarked for demolition with the inscription “to be demolished by GWCL” and the date October 9, 2023, written below it.
The markings were done by some men in civilian clothes suspected to be from the Weija Gbawe Municipal Assembly and the GWCL under the supervision of armed men in military uniforms.
“The marking was done on October 9, 2023, and that was the date they wrote on all the buildings”.
That has left most of us confused because it doesn’t state when the demolition would be done or give us a grace period to evacuate our buildings,” a government appointee who had been living in the community for the past 30 years told Daily Graphic in an interview monitored by theghanareport.
He further called on the government to ensure the demolition was not carried out and lives were protected.
“We support any initiative to protect the water body, but that must not involve the use of the military,” he added, as he called for engagement between the GWCL and the residents to come up with permanent solutions to the issue.
For residents and homeowners in the affected areas, including Agape Down, Agape Royal and Ablekuma Joma, the move to demolish their over 500 houses had left them spending the last two days under the looming fear that their hundreds of millions of Ghana cedis-worth properties were going to be pulled down with no compensation or a resettlement plan.
Some of the residents revealed that several houses had already been demolished in Joma, a nearby community in the same municipality, with no prior notice or compensation for the victims.
Other residents stated that their houses had been earmarked, but no reason had been given for the demolition, although their houses were far from the buffer zone of the river.
The residents who fear the pending demolition of their houses worth billions of cedis are calling on the government to intervene and save them immediately.
Some opined that the demolition exercise may cause psychological problems to the affected persons due to the investments in the structures that have been earmarked for demolition.