Old Fadama, Accra. Flickr/SDI. Some rights reserved.20 June 2015, Accra. At 4:30 in the morning, in the midst of heavy rain, the police and military descended on Old Fadama – one of the biggest slums in Ghana – and began a forced eviction along the nearby Odaw River. There was no prior notice as to what parts of the slum, housing 90,000 to 100,000 squatters, would be affected. Since then, the mayor of Accra Alfred Vanderpujie has stated with puzzling honesty that the eviction area was determined during the middle of the eviction. Some 10,000 residents were caught by surprise. No sufficient time was reserved for them to pack their belongings, let alone find alternative accommodation.
Worse still, almost no national or international organisations have been speaking out against the eviction or gathering testimonials of abuses. But once in the slum these circulate in abundance. I talked to children, who report being choked by teargas. Some dwellers have rubber bullets as evidence of being shot at. Finally, others say they were beaten up by the police when rushing to gather belongings from their homes.
This was by no means a singular event. In the last month, three more communities have been evicted. All in all, a bleak month in the lives of the urban poor in Accra that culminated with the president of Ghana John Mahama ordering a nationwide demolition of illegal structures. The mayor of Accra, in turn, said that the partial eviction of Old Fadama, which he prefers to call ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’, was the “greatest decision since Independence”.
