Ministers, Chief Executive—imagine a child’s bare foot pressing into the soft earth of Glefe, sinking into a cradle of discarded sachets. Imagine the hush that follows a bubble’s rise from poisoned water, a single pop that echoes in empty lungs. This is the sound of our shared promise breaking.
I’ve walked the lagoon’s rim at dawn, when mist hovers like an apology over murky pools. Nets no longer ripple the surface—only plastic vortices spin in stagnant currents, glinting under a sky bruised by neglect. Once, the lagoon’s breath kept rhythm with drumbeats of celebration. Today, it gulps toxic air.
The water here carries stories of loss. In every drop, parasitic eggs whisper of bodies weakened, of mothers haunted by coughs in the night. Wells taste of metals that stain memory itself, and mosquitoes spring from blocked drains like whispered curses. This is not nature’s wrath, but our collective forgetting made flesh.
And memory was once the lagoon’s lifeblood. Elders spoke of canoe chases beneath full moons, of fish as silver promises dancing at dawn. That lore now drifts on landfills, buried under mounds of kerosene cans, e-waste, and yesterday’s sachets—trash fashioned into tombstones for what we refuse to remember.
Yet in the hush, a new chorus stirs. Youth hover overhead in rented drones, mapping every crater of refuse. Neighbors plant vetiver and cattails with trembling determination, bartering blades of grass for clean water’s return. Women’s hands sift compost, coaxing fertilizer from filth, spinning survival into livelihood.
These gestures are incantations—each seed planted, each map drawn, a verse in a resurrection hymn. But rituals alone will not suffice. We ask you to legislate with the same urgency a child needs clean water: enshrine waste registration as law, impose real penalties on illegal dumpers, and open a hotline that does not swallow cries for help.
Remember, the borders of policy must reach beyond asphalt and annex into every street and gutter. Fold Glefe into Accra’s master plan not as an afterthought, but as proof of our covenant with the city’s most vulnerable. This is how dignity returns: through statutes that mirror compassion.
I write not to chastise, but to revolt. Let this letter be a spark struck against damp wood. Glefe’s soil already holds the tinder of recovery—your choice is whether to add wind. Will you fan embers into flame, or let this place smolder in silence?
Where waste settles, memory rots. But where we choose to remember, waste cannot abide. Let Glefe’s revival begin in law and in ritual, in policy and in poem—so that tomorrow, a child may tread upon clean earth and hear the lagoon breathe once more.
With urgency and hope,
Richard Dablah
