Have you recently passed by the once well-equipped and maintained Efua Sutherland Park in Accra? Perhaps not—even if that is your case, GhanaCelebrities.Com captured the state of the Children’s Park a few months ago and words like ‘appalling, shocking and pathetic’ were not enough to depict what has become of the park.
It’s an inherent Ghanaian problem: we lack the culture of maintenance and more than enough, we’ve reduced important national monuments to rodents’ habitat. Places of tourism capable of fetching the country significant revenue to cushion our struggling economy have been freely rented out to rats and bats—some are the perfect avenues to host a global cobweb exhibition.
Our recent photo feature on the Efua Sutherland’s Children Park was shocking but what we’ve discovered following that coverage goes become the shock of seeing how the park has deteriorated under the national watch, in our capital city.
Today, Accra cannot boast of a modern Children’s Park or any place worth taking our children to—they can’t have Disney but at least, they deserve something within budget to kindle the beauty of being children as far as playgrounds are concerned.
But once again, the awfulness of our politics of discontinuity—where a change in ‘government officials’ implies the suspension of all policies, ideas and negotiations by the precious officials no matter how valuable these policies are has truncated a viable prospect of restoring and improving the Children’s Park.
Following our publication on the inexcusable state of the Efua Sutherland’s Children Park, we decided to find out how come no entity or persons have taken interest in the revival of the park—and we got information about a company -Downtown Leisure, which had tried to invest a whopping 3 million dollars into the park but they were ‘frustrated’ by our own government.
For years, the executives of Downtown Leisure company, which specialises in recreational facilities, tried all that was possible to rejuvenate the Park by proposing to invest $3million into it but when everything was almost set, a change at the Ministry in charge (Ministry of Women and Children Affairs renamed Gender, Children and Social Protection) ‘killed’ all the progress the company had made with the Ministry.