Barely a week ago, a storey-building at Akim Batabi in the Eastern Region collapsed, wounding and killing dozens of people who were in attendance to perform religious duties.
Interestingly, we are told, some of the reasons why the church members were there included fasting and praying for their leader who was critically ill.
It turned out that, with the shepherd himself a mere human, there was little protection for the sheep who ended up being victims in the tragedy.
Negligence
Almost a decade ago, a similar fate befell the country when a shopping mall at Achimota, which belonged to MELCOM, collapsed, killing several workers and wounding several in the late hours of the morning.
These are aside of incidents of ritual flooding in which we have blamed the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) for negligence in carrying out their schedules.
Total number of people who have recently been caught largely in the crossfires of these acts of negligence may reach over five hundred, including the Accra floods.
In all three cases, namely the MELCOM, Kwame Nkrumah Circle flooding and fires and the current Akim Batabi carnage, a combined team of personnel from the Police, Fire Service, Armed Forces and National Disaster Management Organisation, with heavy logistics, had to be put together by the state to attempt a recovery of the persons who were injured, trapped or dead. And the cost involved runs into billions of cedis that could have gone into development.
Preying pastors
Unfortunately, Ghana’s culture and tradition of hospitality in feeding into the commercialisation of churches and breeding of mercenary politics appear to have come to stay, with politicians and celebrities, men and women in the security agencies also being complicit.
In the milieu of the demand for their services, regulating the activities of these private, one-man churches become challenging, including ensuring that church buildings follow stipulated construction designs.
In other jurisdictions, the liability would be falling squarely on the proprietor of the church, including facing severe sanctions, apart from closure of the religious facility.
Unfortunately, it is this non-commitment to basic laws on construction that has led to the sad saga of the Akim Batabi chapel being engineered on-and-off over 25 years.
No wonder, with construction activity being dictated by the street wisdom of the leader and his masons and steel benders, rather than a one-time design, what would happen is haphazard activity, without in-design alterations being guided and supervised by local government authorities.
Balancing compassion with responsibility
While we commend government for intervening in the tragic incident and bearing the medical bills of the affected persons, beyond a donation of GHC200,000 for affected victims, we believe the recurring incidents would provide for an opportunity for us as a nation to speed up our digitization processes in particularly monitoring such magnitude of construction works.
We believe the intervention is in line with government’s sense of compassion and responsibility, which culminated in the designing of several social initiatives.
That, however, should not provide us with a licence to continue abusing bye-laws intended at sanitizing society for the mutual benefit of the state and citizens.
Sanctions
The local government authorities should also be seen to be enforcing the laws on people building along waterways or other unapproved areas, without waiting for public sympathy to numb the effects of such sanctions on the public and communities.
It is also our opinion that some sanction is meted out to the proprietor, while any effort to reconstruct the chapel is supervised by the district assembly in sending signals to mercenary men of God that the laws of Ghana still work.
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