IT is worrying the practice where we wait for calamities to hit us before we think and map out strategies to address them. And interestingly this has become part and parcel of our daily activities. People and families in their homes prefer to be affected by one calamity or the other, and then later think of ways of remedying such situations.
CERTAINLY, there are some natural disasters that cannot be averted. But, what about those which we can work as a people to prevent? In fact, we wish to state that we have not been proactive so far as our strife to develop is concerned.
WE at TODAY are of the firm belief that if we continue along that path we will certainly get nowhere, and will always be caught off guard any time, with no development in the country to help improve the lives of ordinary Ghanaians. We need to be proactive and also think ahead of how to deal with preventable situations before they occur.
THAT brings us to last Thursday’s calamity when the 10-stroey building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Accra was gutted by fire and rendered completely useless. Inasmuch as the paper regrets the incident, we think that, had the national fire service been well equipped to undertake their services, they could have done much more to save the situation from further deterioration.
THEREFORE owing to their constraints, they did very little to douse the raging fire which stopped at nothing in rendering the ministry impotent. There is no denying the fact that valuable documents have been destroyed. And as a nation we have not been good at storing vital information, so then, the question we ask is: Where and how are we going to retrieve all the valuable documents which were destroyed by the fire?
THE paper sometimes cannot understand the way our security agencies are treated. The reality on the ground is that the national fire service is not the only security agency that is under resourced. Our police service, the navy among others face a lot of challenges, yet, our governments continue to overlook their grievances, and instead wait for the unexpected to happen. How many ministries or government agencies are we going to see razed down by fire before we act?
IT is good that President John Evans Atta Mills has directed the setting up of a committee to look into the cause of the fire. That aside, we hope that the police in its investigations would get us some clues regarding who or what started the fire. For now, we only have to hope and pray that another ministry is not consumed by an inferno.
IT is also refreshing to note that President Mills has acknowledged the need to equip our fire fighters with state-of-the-art facilities to enable them douse fires quickly any time there are fire incidents in the country. We think that the time is ripe for us to take a critical look at our state agencies.
WE further urge the government to adequately resource our security agencies. We believe that it is when such proactive measures are taken that we can help prevent some of such calamities. We must also think of ensuring that all our ministries and government establishments are provided with adequate fire extinguishers.
AS we sympathize with the workers of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we hope that they will exercise restraint for government to address the problem to enable them continue with their services to the nation.