Haruna Iddrisu Fires Back at NPP Over Flood Rhetoric, Urging Realism Over Political Timelines | Discuss Ghana

The partisan war of words surrounding Accra’s catastrophic flood recovery has officially breached the executive level. Responding to intense criticism from the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) regarding the speed of the government’s crisis response, the Minister for Education, Hon. Haruna Iddrisu, has issued a fiery, blunt rebuttal, urging political opponents and the public to be realistic about the timelines required to fix decades of structural decay.

In a widely circulated policy statement broadcast across major media networks on Wednesday, July 1, 2026, the prominent sector minister slammed the opposition's narrative as hypocritical. Bypassing standard diplomatic messaging, Iddrisu explicitly pointed out that an administration cannot be reasonably expected to completely overhaul a deeply flawed urban drainage system in a fraction of the time its predecessors spent managing the exact same crisis:

"We must call out the blatant political hypocrisy when analyzing this national challenge. If you [NPP] didn't solve the flood situation in 8 years, don't expect us [NDC] to solve it in 2 years.

Engineering a permanent solution to Accra’s low-lying drainage vulnerabilities requires massive capital, long-term spatial planning, and a complete overhaul of choked primary channels—not short-term partisan talking points. The public must understand that the systematic neglect and poor structural oversight that built up over nearly a decade cannot magically vanish overnight. We are actively deploying emergency relief and mobilizing military engineers, but building permanent climate resilience takes systematic time and uncompromised planning."

 

The Architecture of the Partisan Infrastructure Standoff

The statement highlights the growing tension within the legislative and executive branches as both major political parties attempt to control the narrative of the recent disaster:

The Two-Year Rebuild Paradox: Government communication teams have heavily backed Iddrisu's assessment, arguing that the current administration is dealing with severe, inherited structural bottlenecks. They maintain that trying to finish multi-million dollar initiatives—like the World Bank-backed Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development (GARID) project—cannot be rushed into a two-year window without breaking essential engineering safety standards.

The Siltation Legacy: The administration further argued that the extreme choking of the primary Odaw channel and the Alajo drainage lines did not happen overnight. Decades of unchecked household waste dumping and a failure to enforce strict zoning laws during the previous eight years have left the current government dealing with a massive backlog of continuous desilting and dredging operations.

Expanding the Ministerial Scope: While Haruna Iddrisu's daily executive focus remains locked on managing the academic sector—including his recent directive to the GES regarding campus discipline and code validations—his position as a senior cabinet minister and a heavyweight within the National Democratic Congress (NDC) allows his voice to carry immense political weight across all national policy debates, including the state's ongoing emergency flood interventions.