The International Labour Organization (ILO) on Wednesday urged the government to adopt a scientific approach to deal with the congestion and decongestion of major cities.
"Years of congestion of our cities cannot all together be attributed to stubbornness of a recalcitrant few.we need a more scientific understanding of the reasons for the persistence of the problem to be able to deal with it effectively.
"Adoption of heavy-handedness by city authorities in decongestion over so many decades has proven to be repeatedly ineffective and at considerable financial, economic and social costs to all and needs a paradigm shift," Dr Nii Moi Thompson, ILO International Project Expert, said in Accra.
Dr Thompson identified three major reasons why previous decongestion exercises failed such as the structure of the national economy which he said had remained virtually unchanged for over a century, resulting in diminished employment opportunities in the formal sector.
The other reasons are lack of proper planning by local authorities as local populations have grown exponentially, creating chaos rather than order, even within the public bureaucracy that is always so eager to undertake decongestion exercise.
Dr Thompson said failure of local authorities was the result of their dysfunctional institutions to enforce even the minimum regulations that they put in place until minor transgressions fester into major social and economic crises.
The ILO Expert, who was speaking at the inauguration of a National Committee on the Informal Economy (NCIE) under the Decent Work Country Programme of the ILO, described the decongestion exercises as a vicious cycle that had consumed resources and emotions but yielded little results.
"When you do something time and time again, and time and time again you get the same undesirable results, it is time to step back and consider the underlying causes of the problem," Dr Thompson stated.
In a related development the Chief Executive Officer of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly Dr Alfred Vanderpuije, has vowed to decongest the national capital and wage a relentless war on illegally sited structures.
He said he would consider it a failure of his mandate to modernize Accra if the problem of choked streets, particularly in the business district, persisted after a reasonable time in office.
Dr Vanderpuije stated recently during an encounter with the media that Accra was a community with many challenges, and while in some areas there had been remarkable achievements in addressing the challenges, the city's managers in some instances had simply failed to capitalize on opportunities to better the lot of the people.
The Chief Executive used the occasion to announce a component of a five-year development strategy to modernize Accra, and stressed the need to call a time-out to assess prevailing challenges and devise appropriate solutions.
"In other words, we come out with a blueprint that spells out a five-year development plan. It will have long term and short term objectives with specific benchmarks addressing the issues and the need for development.
"Number two, we need to create the environment that is conducive for the socio-economic development of Accra. We need to create that environment, we owe it to the residents of Accra," Dr Vanderpuije stated.
He said achieving the goals would require that issues of sanitation, congestion and street hawking were all tackled.
Dr Vanderpuije said other areas that needed immediate attention including improving the assembly's revenue mobilization activities and systems, as well as providing adequate security so the city could have a stress-free night life where people could conveniently do business late into the night without having to close too early for fear of being attacked by criminals.
He said he intended to convince the people of Accra of the need for 'a new Accra' through popularizing his strategic plan and vision, and once the people bought into the ideas, implementation and law enforcement should not be too much to achieve.