Provincial authorities in Accra, Ghana’s capital, have given the owners of structures in the Laboma beach enclave 21 days to remove them.

But how did this sprawl grow to this size? How come the authorities never acted before now?

Both questions are, in a sense, rhetorical. Because Laboma is not news.

A toll booth to access an “illegal” resort

As you approach from the Accra–Tema Beach Road, somewhere between the La Palm Royal Beach Hotel and the old Teshie fishing quarters, a turning appears. There is no signpost from the highway. Suddenly, you confront authority. A toll-booth manned by plus-size ladies. Behind them a group of young men observe vigilantly. The charge is 50 GHS (~$4.5) and you can proceed. There are no receipts, but you get some wristbands.

The road now drops to red laterite. Within fifty metres you encounter a kiosk painted in the yellow and blue of Ghana’s mobile money brands – MTN, Telecel Cash, Airtel. A sign reads Laboma Business Center.

Concrete shells in various stages of completion line unpaved streets. Some are three storeys high, rebar fingers jutting from their rooflines, waiting for a fourth, clearly delayed.

Other structures are colourfully complete: rooftop bars with fairy lights, poolside lounges advertising cocktails at 160 cedis (~$14 a pop), a gym with floor-to-ceiling glass. A coffee shop styled Amsterdam Kitchen occupies one corner.

Somewhere deeper in, a resort offers rooms with 24-hour military patrol. The streets are mud. There are no drains. Water tanks are perched on every roof because Ghana Water, the monopoly state utility, isn’t officially aware of this place. Which raises questions about how come the other state utility, the electricity distributor, ECG, extended lighting. Concrete culvert rings lie stacked in the road, waiting to be buried. The development has so outpaced infrastructure that everything is panting to catch up.

There is a Laboma Beach Resort website, and it has announced this enclave as West Africa’s Biggest Beach Resort. Thirteen operators are listed as “vendors and partners.” According to the lead engineer at La Dade-Kotopon Municipal Assembly, none of these proud businesses have an actual permit to be here.

Yet, here they are, triumphantly managing West Africa’s biggest beach resort.

If that strikes you as odd, wait till you learn that this space is actually designated as part of the country’s main (Teshie) shooting range. It is literally a security zone, on state-vested military land.

What is happening here is akin to a group of wildcat entrepreneurs carving a part of Fort Irwin in California to construct a Las Vegas style strip. Scratch that. This is more like Cotai Strip in Macau or Atlantic Sin City in New Jersey.

Some of the operators at Laboma offer overnight accommodation. Several serve food and alcohol. But none of them have permits from the Environmental Protection Authority or the Assembly.

What they do have are sleek websites, warm TripAdvisor reviews, and the business acumen to quintuple the entry fee over four years because after all who trusts the inflation numbers in Accra?

I find katanomics oozing out of every pore in this fascinating stretch of Accra coastline.

Who even controls the strip?

As mentioned earlier, the land is officially part of the Teshie Military Shooting Range. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the State is very much aware of the encroachment and has been for years. When the Greater Accra Regional Security Council swept the area in July 2024, thirteen people were arrested for invading a security zone allotted to none other than the armed forces.

But there is also the usual State – Traditional Authority tension that confuses so much of municipal planning in Accra. The La stool, through the La Traditional Council, asserts a residual interest rooted in centuries of Ga occupation. The La Shikitele – the Kingmaker – Nii Adjei Koofeh IV, has been issuing warnings about the site since at least 2022.

Customarily, the Traditional Council has granted a youth group – the Laboma Youth Group – permission to use the beachfront. The whole machinery was eased in with typical Ghanaian layering. The Chiefs allowed the youth group in on the basis that there will be no permanent structures or sale of land. What happened next was completely to be expected even though the Shikitele seems surprised: the group “sold lands, built permanent structures and filled up the water bodies.”

The thirteen pioneer operators paid for the land they are on. Alora, Onda, SI Beach, Marbella, Pink Flamingo, Ula Beach Club, Lé Shrine, and the rest, were made to part with money to develop the strip. Even as the official state-sanctioned waterfront development – Accra Marine Drive – languishes in sheer bureaucratic and policy chaos. Entrepreneurs have simply moved in and are trying to engineer something coherent – a multi-operator beach resort – out of official confusion and, frankly, incompetence. The Ghana News Agency has even profiled the place as “the reveller’s preferred destination.”

Accra is Africa’s only mega-city blessed with a coastline that lacks an impressive waterfront vista. Accra has so far resolutely refused to embrace the picturesque charms of coastal glamour one finds in Dar es Salaam, Dakar, or Cape Town. Even Lagos gives you Marina and large sweeps from the Third Mainland Bridge. Into this bizarre vacuum, entrepreneurs have decided to step in.

We bring up the katanomics framework here, however, principally to illustrate the failure of national learning. And to show how political spectacles consistently substitute for calm, methodical, long-term, consistent and cohesive policy responses. Despite repeated entry into Laboma by politicians with security forces in tow, the real vacuum at Laboma – a spatial plan, a zoning scheme, and a permit framework – has never been filled.

LaDMA’s engineer told the Ghanaian Times in March 2025 that the assembly “would soon carry out a zoning exercise to know the next step.” It is clear from the situation at Laboma that the entrepreneurs are trying to fill a clear need for waterfront recreation in the capital. It is abundantly clear that the zoning system is a total mess.

In an effectively functioning democracy, especially after the floods (which in this area was partially blamed on encroachment), the political agitation over the encroachment would have triggered serious policy reflection, an update to the legal framework, and then a clear crystalisation of the norms. Rather, what we keep getting is the mere rituals of accountability.

•  •  •

Shabby Reclamation

We commissioned drone photography and videos to better understand what is going on at Laboma.

Using the data, we constructed a crude, data-limited, Digital Terrain Model, to grasp the evolutionary changes underway in the vicinity.

Between the finished bars and the half-built shells, we saw clear evidence of an attempt at “land reclamation” from the sea. The area is prone to serious sea erosion, which threatens the recreational potential of the waterfall. In the absence of any serious engineering strategy, the wildcat entrepreneurs are making do. Using laterite from nearby patches and sand trucked in from the Akuapem range, as well as construction rubble, waste, and assorted stuff, they have filled in various edges of the shoreline to erect lounges and the like.

Colour-space segmentation of the imagery quantifies this development. Using excess-green indices and HSV differencing to classify pixels by surface type, across sixteen aerial frames covering the Laboma enclave, we found that bare earthworks and fill-ups account for nineteen per cent of the visible land surface. That proportion is nearly double the figure at the La Palm Royal Beach Hotel next door – a planned and permitted resort with gardens, drainage, and an actual building licence.

Semantic segmentation overlay of the Laboma enclave. Left: original drone frame. Right: classified surface. Green = vegetation, orange = bare laterite fill, blue = water, grey = built structures. Note the fill front advancing into the mangrove block.

Land-cover shares derived from sixteen segmented drone frames per site. Laboma shows nearly double La Palm’s proportion of raw earthworks – the signature of a site mid-conversion rather than a completed settlement.

I am not diminishing the environmental impact. The rubble-and-waste fill has no engineered bearing capacity. No geotechnical survey has been published for any parcel of land here. Leachate from decomposing refuse percolates through the sand aquifer and enters the bathing water fifty metres away. This is a serious mess that must be rectified.

But rectification requires doing the heavy-lifting and engineering mind-crunching to zone the place out and implement clear standards for reinforcing the beach against the encroaching Atlantic ocean. Merely demolishing structures every couple of years and waiting until new shanty resorts pop up before re-entering the enclave with Police and Soldiers is neither rational nor competent.

•  •  •

A dying lagoon

The drones also revealed that behind the beach road, behind the mangrove block, facing death by hydrological isolation, lies the Kpeshie Lagoon. It drains a catchment of roughly 110 square kilometres, collecting rainfall from as far as the Akuapem Ridge and channelling it through streams and drains to the coast, where the lagoon’s outlet bar opens seasonally to release the water into the Atlantic.

That outlet runs through the sand barrier where Laboma is sprawling from.

Joseph Nii Annan Lamey, chairman of the East Dade-Kotopon Development Trust, says that the lagoon’s buffer has been reduced from almost thirty acres to just a hundred feet. The Assembly’s records indicate that only twelve acres of the area has been allocated. The remaining 18 acres “cannot be accounted for.” Meanwhile LaDMA’s head of works says that the lagoon’s footprint has shrunk from 118.78 hectares to 56.91.

The salient fact here is that the lagoon’s buffer has a development plan from 2013 that has simply not been fully consolidated not to talk of implemented.

GARID’s analysis tracked the Korle stream – one of the channels feeding Kpeshie – from a width of 261 metres in 2002 to 10.6 metres in 2026. In 2024 years, the stream has shrunk by 96%. Pause and reflect on that.

One fact that became clear during the research for this essay is that though municipal authorities frequently describe the Kpeshie area as a Ramsar site, it really is not. It has no cover under the Wetland Management (Ramsar Sites) Regulations 1999. Somehow, someone just assumed that it is one of the 6 Ramsar Sites and never bothered to extend proper environmental protection. One day, some encroacher will take the matter to court only for municipal authorities to get egg on their faces.

•  •  •

When the rains come

On Monday 29 June 2026, it rained rather heavily.

Al Jazeera reported twelve confirmed dead across Greater Accra. The National Fire Service rescued over four hundred people. The UNDP noted that for most Ghanaians, “the most troubling feature of this disaster is not its scale, but its familiarity.” The Tse Addo-Teshie bush road was impassable. The Kor Bridge at Tse Addo was submerged.

These are Kpeshie’s arteries. They flooded because the lagoon’s capacity to absorb storm water had been systematically, physically, deliberately reduced by the indiscriminate filling and building that produced Laboma. Water that should have drained seaward was impounded behind the fill platform and pushed backwards, uphill, into Tse Addo, into La, into settlements that had been there for decades before the first cedi changed hands at Laboma’s gate.

A few rich people in Tse Addo tasted the bitter fruits of official incompetence. Hence the sudden flurry of municipal enforcement activity in Laboma and the threatened demolitions in 21 days. Hence the political spectacle.

•  •  •

The Heart of the Matter

Accra’s coastline, for all its length, offers remarkably few stretches of genuinely usable beach. Open defecation is endemic in the unserviced fishing settlements that line much of the shore. Plastic waste collects at the mouth of every drain. The municipal assembly runs periodic clean-ups and officials occasionally acknowledge that the beaches are “increasingly threatened by waste carried into the sea through drains and streams.”

In this context, a relatively clean patch of sand acquires extraordinary value. The scarcity from which that value emanates is partially manufactured by the degradation of everything around it, and the enclave’s own absence of sewerage ensures it contributes to that degradation even as it profits from it.

In a katanomic democracy, the regulatory apparatus to ensure that sound regulation and business profiteering can co-exist exists only on paper and is invoked in press conferences, but the policy layer that would translate the invocation into proper inspections, effective zoning, Dubai-style reclamation without triggering floods, and Amsterdam-style water bypass designs simply fails to materialise.

Often political theatre served in press spectacles substitute for policy thinking and governance redesign.

•  •  •

•  •  •

A Short History of Policy Dyslexia

In 2020, an applicant sought to change the Kpeshie area’s use from Mangrove (Protected Coastal Water Front Zone) to an 18-unit Residential Estate and Recreational Centre. The site listed was approximately 3.22 acres, situated behind the Ghana International Trade Fair along the Lagoon bypass and close to the Kpeshie Lagoon. This attempt at legal redesignation was resisted by Teki Akuetteh, with the support of the Tse Addo (East La) community and Social and Scientific Research for Development (SSRD-Global). They petitioned to halt the proposed land-use change and protect the Kpeshie Lagoon.

In February 2023, the Works Minister orders a halt, naming “Messrs RA Conglomerate” among those operating without permits. In July 2024, the Regional Minister orders demolition, arrests thirteen “encroachers”, promises round-the-clock security. In March 2025, the La Traditional Council tours the area and warns everyone to leave. In September 2025, LaDMA’s MCE announces demolition will begin “latest next week.” In January 2026, structures at Tse Addo are demolished, displacing residents. In February 2026, the new Regional Minister praises demolished Kpeshie structures as evidence of “political will.” In July 2026, the Flood Mitigation Task Force begins dredging across Accra, with Laboma listed as a Phase Two target.

Seven interventions across three years, under two governments, by four different officeholders.

The seven interventions are seven performances of accountability in the fine tradition of Katanomics.

In a functional governance system, a catastrophe generates feedback: a flood inquiry, a revised building code, and an enforced setback. The June 2026 flood was Accra’s latest in a recurring series – the 2015 flood killed over 200 when a petrol station exploded in floodwater; the 2016 flood killed at least ten; the 2023 flood prompted yet another round of pledges.

Each event generates little more than political noise.

Meanwhile, Ghana’s shoreline retreats at an average of two metres per year. Accra-wide studies record erosion rates averaging nine metres per year. Teshie is a documented erosional hotspot. These buildings and their crude fill platforms are actually the only, albeit disorganised, effort to hold back the sea. That their ad-hoc rock armour will accelerate downdrift sand starvation toward Teshie proper is a simple consequence of poor technical ability.

But one way or another, what they are doing would need to be done, properly.