It’s not a child’s play meandering through Accra’s nooks and crannies. If you happen to be a first timer, then my condolences.
The city is bereft of maps as is the case in other planned places, plus all its weird name tags for the various neighbourhoods.
Life is difficult here not just because consumer power is constantly on the fall, but also because individual movement is not as easy as it is everywhere else.
The title of this article is that of a blog managed by a journalist friend of mine who was an intern in Ghana on a Canadian-sponsored initiative.
For six months, she kept posting about how she was being given wrong directions and how she herself could not make sense out of the various confusing directions.
Of course she would quickly go ahead to compute how much she might have lost in the process amid Accra’s fascinating intrigues.
It’s amazing, after three years in Accra,
I’m still not on top of how routes work in Accra. Accra is just a difficult puzzle.
In the middle of last year I needed to seek medical attention for a severe headache which meant I had to go to the Mamobi Polyclinic in the densely populated Nima suburb of Accra.
From the 37 Hospital, I was directed to get down at the Nima main stop. When I got into the trotro, the driver’s mate was singing a different tune. According to the utterly unkempt young man, I had to alight either at “gutter junction” or “borla junction”.
At that particular point my head was aching so badly. I felt so weak yet here I was, not knowing where to turn in order to get to a certain Mamobi Polyclinic.
There were no clear routes where I was, the supposed signpost intended to direct patients to the clinic was pointing in chaotic directions. At every point where I asked for direction, people gave me different ones, depending on their understanding of the area and the route.
Need I still talk about the pain I was going through at that point?
The city is a beautiful one, at least per the standards of the neighbouring ones. What we have fallen short of doing as a people and specifically as city authorities is to make living in it comfortable.
The Accra Metropolitan Assembly, the body tasked with the duty of ensuring sanity in the capital, is a very hardworking one, no doubt.
The AMA has successfully cleared some major streets in Accra of hawkers after some resistance.
The city is now a millennium one, whether those of us living within or without it agree or not.
When are we going to implement measures that would ensure that we properly name our streets and make neighbourhood routes as clear as possible even for the most illiterate of persons?
When are we going to clamp down on all those people who are building at points and on parcels of lands which are supposed to be left for streets?
This is also one of the reasons why we are engulfed by floods almost on an annual basis.
Is there nobody working at the Town and Country Planning office?
When are we going to do away with the weird self-imposed neighbourhood name tags like the atopa junctions, the bofflot roundabouts, the gutters, the borlas and replace them with well-documented names that are clear even from the farthest of places?
Is it even out of place to ask for a system where maps are provided at some of the major lorry parks to guide commuters on where to find what, especially now that we have been honoured with a millennium status?
We are already suffering the unbearable stench and embarrassing traffic jams in Accra’s principal streets .
I’m still dreaming of that day in our own Accra when I can sit in my room, give my Madina house address to my 80-year-old grandmother knowing that it is possible for her to find me without picking a brawl or two with some confused trotro’s mate.
Maybe then my Canadian friend would not have too many reasons to curse her stars for making another trip down here.