The Ugly Face Of The Capital

It is the gateway to West Africa, so the sales pitch by Ghanaian politicians has been. In 2023 it was labeled the world’s book capital by UNESCO in the rotating allocation. Referring to the additional financially-related institutions pushing in, some have tiptoed into the fanciful realms and ambitiously called it “the next financial capital”.

A Google search for Ghana’s capital, Accra sends you to the best zones throwing up all the garnishes. For these reasons, Accra is fenced up with the status of West Africa’s glamorous places by Google.

However, if you go to the city’s suburban areas, you find horrible things unbefitting of the exalted status. The image attached to this narrative is one such thing. The potholes in the inner perimeters of Accra, place Ghana’s capital not at the top of the range.

In 2014, Ghana participated in the UN Habitat Fair held in the Colombian city of Medellin. This was a World Cup of cities or a competition among world capitals. Examiners do not look at the aesthetics that only give cosmetic beauty. Such occurrences are flagged down as meretricious. An uplift of cities drives investments and tourism.

The Ghana Report would like to ask, what has happened to the overnight asphalt overlays introduced in urban areas in 2014 and continued until it seemingly disappeared in 2021?

Aside from bad roads, street littering, indiscriminate placements of billboards, malfunctioning of streetlights, and the mushrooming of slums are some of the poor tastes of Accra city. Quite an irony about a resource-rich country such as Ghana where the flanks of most roads are not slabbed but are brown patches of raw sand.