On Sunday, March 29, 2026, we once again announced our collective carelessness as a nation to the world when an uncompleted three-storey building at the Newtown Experimental D/A School in Accra, Greater Accra Region, collapsed.
The incident, according to media reports, claimed three lives – two women and a man. Twenty others who were rescued sustained various degrees of injuries. The internet, on that fateful Sunday, went into mourning. Eyewitnesses shared horrifying accounts, with some bemoaning the apparent absence of emergency services at the very beginning of the incident.
“Right now, if there were an excavator here, they [civilian respondents] could have used it to clear the debris. Instead, some carpenters have mounted the roofing of the collapsed building to take off the roof so they see if they will get access to the people trapped,” an eyewitness shared in a social media video.
The eyewitness recounted that later a woman was rescued and immediately, bystanders poured powder over her as a way of celebrating her escape from death. “Three people have been rescued so far, and a woman among them who seemed fit was showered with powder and sent home. I only thought that after this rescue she should have been taken to the hospital for medical assessment, but this is my country, Ghana,” he lamented.
Later, when the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS) arrived, the residents had done what their might and laymen’s knowledge in rescue operations could allow them to do. Another eyewitness, who doubled as one of the civilian respondents, told the media that he saw a woman trapped under a beam. The trapped woman called for help, but he recounted that he had neither the skill nor the strength to lift the beam from her chest. The said woman requested water, which he bought for her—a sachet of water. Sadly, she passed away.
The questions, therefore, are: when did the eyewitnesses call the GNFS, and did they arrive on time? I seek not to apportion blame here. Rather, I would like to draw the attention of both the public and our emergency services to the fact that emergency response is a collective responsibility. Every second in emergency response is crucial. One could argue that, perhaps, had the GNFS and their partners arrived on time, the woman trapped under the beam and the other deceased individuals might have been saved.
This sad incident is, however, not new in Ghana. Several buildings have collapsed in the country, including the infamous 2012 Melcom building disaster. In fact, a Fact Check Ghana report indicates that from 2010 to 2023, Ghana recorded at least 55 building collapses, with Greater Accra alone accounting for 14. If you trace and read all the reports on these building collapses, you will realise that the causes are always the same: poor construction practices, use of substandard materials, unqualified contractors, lack of enforcement of building codes, and unauthorized extensions, among others. The case of the Newtown building collapse is not different.
Eyewitnesses told the media that the building had been left uncompleted since 2012. Residents knew the structure could collapse at any time, and authorities can never absolve themselves of responsibility for this carnage.
In fact, NADMO, in the aftermath of the incident, has said that the building was marked unsafe weeks before the atrocity. “It was not safe, and people were clearly advised not to go in, yet that directive was ignored. That is what has brought us to this unfortunate situation,” the Director-General of NADMO, Major (Rtd) Dr Joseph Bikanyi Kuyon, told The Ghanaian Times. In any serious country, executives of both NADMO and the municipal assembly, and any other person involved in the issuance of the directive, could be tried for negligence—murder, for that matter.
It is absolutely balderdash for authorities to absolve themselves of responsibility by claiming the building was marked unsafe and that people were told not to go in. Did they cordon off the building? What concrete measures did they put in place, as many of the residents who thronged ground zero feared that many students could have died if the incident had happened on a school day? And what prevented the authorities from pulling down the structure in the first place? Dr Joseph Bikanyi Kuyon must be charged by his own words: “If the coordination [between authorities] had been swift, the building might still have collapsed, but no one would have been inside.”
If the Melcom building disaster did not get us to put on our thinking caps, I doubt we ever will. In 2012, Vice-President of the Ghana Institution of Engineering, Magnus Quarshie, told the BBC that preliminary investigation into the Melcom building collapse suggested “workmanship was very, very poor.” In 2026, President of the same institution, Ing. Ludwig Annang Hesse, tells the BBC that “we have the laws, we have the regulation, and if we do things right, we will not get this problem.”
Elsewhere, happenings like these trigger serious national change. In America, all public building doors open outward, and that is for a reason. In Holyoke, a city in Massachusetts, in 1875, a fire outbreak at the Precious Blood Church claimed 70 lives. The calamity did not only become breaking news across the nation; it called for a massive change in building codes—public building doors must open outward.
The rationale was that making public building doors open outward will allow “people to flow out of a building and not get caught behind doors in case of an emergency,” the Daily Hampshire Gazette notes. While this building code started in Holyoke, it quickly gained traction across the United States, and it is strictly enforced even today. Ghana should have by now implemented stricter enforcement of its building codes and not have experts continually giving excuses and complaining to the very people they must protect.
Moreover, since civilians always take the lead in dousing fires and responding to emergencies in Ghana, would it not be a sensible thing to teach emergency response in our schools? And, ideally, Ghanaians, right after junior high school, must undertake a compulsory three- to six-month service with any of our agencies—GNFS, NADMO, and the Ambulance Service, among others. By this, we equip and empower our citizens for effective community service while we hope that someday our politicians will fall in love with wisdom.
The saddest reality is that if you have practiced journalism in Ghana for at least a year, you could comfortably sit in your room, predict, and write stories that will happen tomorrow or in the future. Take old news scripts, change the dates, and you are good to go to press! You may want to call this prophetic journalism. Be informed, however, that one does not need any spiritual insight to write such stories. In a country where we always pray, asking God to do for us what He has already empowered us to do for ourselves, one cannot expect anything different from business as usual.
May the Lord save His own.
The writer is a freelance journalist and an International Affairs Analyst. The views expressed herein are solely his and do not, in any way, reflect the editorial policy of this organisation.
Email: nehusthan4@yahoo.com
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