FROM FARMS TO BUILDINGS - THE HARMATTAN OUR SCAPEGOAT

As a child harmattan wasn’t my favorite time of the year. Dry nose, cracked lips, unrelenting scorching sun, very cold nights and the list goes on. Today I actually look forward to that season, especially the cold nights; but the harmattan of before is not the same today. My lips are hardly cracked, the nights are hardly ever cold and Accra no longer experiences the mini ‘London’ effect, contending instead with an ever scorching sun. Unfortunately, we still have the rampant bush fires especially in the Northern parts of the country where the harmattan is more severe.
Never a day went by in those days without the horrifying reports of bush fires destroying acres of crops, homes and the loss of lives. These bush fires usually start as a result of farmers leaving fires unattended, hunters trying to smoke out grass-cutters and inadvertently letting the fire get out of hand or a smoker carelessly disposing off a cigarette butt. Those frequent bush fires destroyed farms which sometimes contributed to the perennial food shortages the country faced between April and July.
Unlike previous years however, the recent harmattan has brought in its wake a different kind of “bush fire”- markets, factories and shops are now being razed down more frequently during this season. Is the harmattan now directing its wrath to our buildings instead of farms? Which is not to say fires raging through our farms is a better option.

If I correctly recall, the Swedru branch of Melcolm was the first casualty this season followed by the Kumasi market and later the producers of our Leyland Paint, the BBC Industrials Company Ghana. In all those disasters our ever faithful Fire Service was present to perform their task which was followed by the all too familiar complaints of them not arriving quickly enough with adequate water to quench the raging fire – as if the personnel of the Fire Service were the cause of the fire to begin with (hey, hold your horses, we all know our fire services have their own inefficiencies we cannot finish tackling on this space, but we can all agree they did not start those disasters, right?).
Safety issues have been taken for granted for far too long in our country. Why should places holding large quantities of combustible products be so lax with fire safety? This is not the first time any of our markets including the Kumasi one had been razed down with fire yet all we do when these disasters occur is to form fancy committees to come up with recommendations to abate them. It’s not as if we do not know how these fires start; they usually happen as a result of faulty electrical wiring which overload the electrical system. Furthermore vantage points for firefighting are overcrowded with illegal structures thus making it difficult for the fire men to reach the sources quickly enough to mitigate the damages. For how long are we going to endure these disasters before we learn our lessons? I can bet on my very last pesewa that none of the major markets in this country have fire extinguishers after all the fires they’ve had but can only hope that our shopping malls or better structured shops have them at least.
Much as it’s important for our fire service personnel be adequately prepared for these disasters, it will be in everyone’s interest if every citizen adopts a proactive attitude towards safety issues. We cannot afford to have these senseless fires raging on. But while at it, can someone plead with the Sun to have some mercy? . . . Please?