ACCESSING OUR HOUSES (JULY 8)

Mr Elvis Afriyie-Ankrah, the Deputy Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, has announced that the ministry will begin a programme tomorrow to improve on the country’s residential address system.
For many years, residents in all settlements in the country have ignored spatial planning and development standards. Consequently, almost all settlements are being turned into slums with their attendant challenges such as filth, crime and homelessness.
Accra, for instance, has become a sprawling city lacking in many amenities that will promote healthy lifestyles among the residents.
Also, the developments in the city have outstripped the provision of utilities such as electricity and water, as well as the construction of good roads to link the suburbs in the city.
Presently, the security agencies are overwhelmed by the menace of , because Accra, for instance, has grown in leaps and bounds but the access roads to emerging communities are in such poor shape that it takes hours on end for the police to respond to distress calls.
This lack of appreciation for basic planning standards in our cities has also led to fire personnel not being able to respond to fire alarms because either the fire engines cannot have access to the houses or, where there is access, the poor residential address system renders their mission impossible.
In the so-called advanced countries, houses and street numbers make it possible for visitors to make their way around. Taxi drivers find their way in such cities with the help of maps because all the streets and houses are numbered.
The only skills required to make one’s way around the city is the ability to read the map while in Ghana visitors and residents identify houses by other things such as trees, hills, electricity and telephone poles, bridges and kiosks.
Elsewhere, letters, newspapers and other vital documents are delivered to residents in their houses, because the service providers can easily locate such houses. The use of credit cards are also encouraged because residents can easily be identified.
The DAILY GRAPHIC recalls similar exercises in the past that did not yield the desired results and prays that the officials who will implement the initiative will learn from history in order to avoid the pitfalls of the past.
Ghana is a beacon of hope to many people in Africa and also as trailblazers in many fields, we need to learn quickly from others who have made strides in house and street numbering in order to promote better planning in the country.
Spatial planning, so far, has been haphazard, because standards have been ignored.
The DAILY GRAPHIC thinks that we do not need foreign assistance to conform to laid-down regulations about infrastructural development.
Let us abide by the basic rules of planning, so that we do not create more slums in all our cities and major towns where mosquitoes will breed to give us malaria and other health problems.
The DAILY GRAPHIC, therefore, calls on all the statutory bodies working on the project to show commitment, so that the bottlenecks created by the lack of street and house numbering can be addressed.
We need the numbering of our streets and houses in order to make our movement in the city and towns less cumbersome and enhance business transactions.