The news from Ghana about the aviation sector has been good. About two weeks ago, the Ghana Airports Company Ltd. Started operating a brand new ultra-modern Airport Terminal known as Terminal 3, located on the south side of the current Terminals One and Two at the Kotoka International Airport in Accra. To all intents and purposes, and from those who have passed through the new Airport Terminal, the videos and the pictures we have seen point to the fact that this project was an architectural masterpiece.
We congratulate the government and people of Ghana on this notable achievement on the aviation front. We wish to particularly commend former President John DramaniMahama and his NDC government under whose government and tenure this project was started. They deserve our congratulations. Elsewhere in this edition, we carry a story on the opening of the new terminal, its specifications and cost of construction. A lot of money, time, energy, thinking and other resources have gone into making this dream a reality.
We are however sounding a note of caution to the management of this facility that their handling of this new Airport Terminal should NOT be along the same lackadaisical Ghanaian attitude towards public property and its maintenance. It is sad to note and emphasize that maintenance of properties, especially public ones, is not part of our culture. We treat and misuse public property in any way we want forgetting that the mistreatment, mismanagement and lack of maintenance cost the whole nation a lot. We mostly do not care about taking care of public properties until they start to collapse.
We go through and create exits on public properties where we should not. One sad example about public attitude to public property can be found on the N1 Highway in Accra, known as the George H. W. Bush Highway linking the tetteh Quarshie Interchange and Mallam Junction. People have destroyed the wire nets and fencing dividing this busy Highway to make short-cut routes to cross the highway in dangerous fashions even where they are overpass walkways. Most of the dividing wire mesh have either being stolen, destroyed or disappeared. Yes, that is public property. And there are countless number of such public properties that are either mismanaged, destroyed or ill-maintained costing the nation a lot of money.
We are entreating all those that use this new Terminal constructed at a heavy cost at public expense, those that are in charge of maintaining the facility as well as those that are in charge of supervising other aspects of the facility’s functioning to treat their jobs and responsibilities with all the seriousness that this facility deserves. We should learn to inculcate into ourselves the maintenance culture that is so missing form our national life.
Congratulations once again to the government and people of Ghana for this achievement and to the numerous Construction contractors for completing this on time and, we are told, well within budget. We shall all be monitoring the use and maintenance of this facility which goes to improve our national image.