VULTURES AND OTHER RELATIVES

I am beginning to wonder why we shoo vultures away on sight, when they are our cousins. We Ghanaians have such vulture-like tendencies, that is it a wonder we have not grown feathered wings.
(Why Vultures? Because it is said that they don't build nests, but perch where they can while the sun is out. But suffer during the rainy season because they don't have a prepared place to shelter)
The rains are here again, and as usual we seem surprised. As if we didn’t know that they would come. The papers are full of complaints ...loss of property, loss of life, general disorder caused by flood waters.
Is it déjà vu? Or were the headlines the same just last year?

Ah, let me ask a question...didn’t we know or haven’t we learnt that stuffing the drains with rubbish during the dry season would worry us when the rains come [as they do every year?].
Didn’t you know when you were building on a waterway that there is a rainy season? Or the price was just right? Oh, did you say you didn’t know it was a waterway? That responsibility squarely falls on the officials who issue building permits. [Is that the town and city planning officials?] But then again, did you ask? Let us be man/woman enough to admit our folly.
But no, as usual, we’re playing out favourite game – the blame game. Which government caused it? Which agency did it? Let us blame it permanently on Kwame Nkrumah, who is dead and cannot answer and on [...in pe, setin pe...] the Ministry of Women’s and Children affairs.
Sound absurd?
Not more so than the blame game.

When the sun was scorching and the heat was sweltering we had no problems, so we didn’t search for solutions. Now it’s pouring and our tears are mixed with the rain.
I don’t want to sound mean but ‘ese moara’. If you continue to live in a flood prone area year after year in the same house, then ese woara. It is true that finding accommodation is a problem, but think about the cost of continuing to live there. What if you lose your life? [or your child’s who has no choice but to live with the silly adults]. I do not have figures to back this, but I am sure the cost of damage to property is huge; and damage not easily be erased. I am picturing broken walls; destroyed furniture [that is if it was not swept away]; stained and smelly mattresses; walls, now two-toned, the bottom half brown; carpets now trays for stones, mud, sand and whatever else the receding flood waters will leave behind.
If you dry it out or buy new ones and do nothing about your situation, ese woara.
Demolition exercises have been proposed, so maybe that will be some relief. But it will probably be short lived. I’m sure next year by this time, we will be tuned in [again] to our favourite programme, ‘what the rain has done’
Am I a doom monger?
Me, I live in a flat, on the second floor, nti ese moara.