I felt my little brother’s frustration when he asked if it was possible to go round and take photos of the poor sanitation and stench in Accra and write an article addressed to the President and the Minister for Sanitation.
For real, Accra is very dirty and smelly. I hold my breath twice on my ride to work, the first at the Kaneshie Market and when the trotro gets to the Kwame Nkrumah Circle Interchange.
The most worrying thing about the situation of filth in Ghana is the nonchalant attitude of Ghanaians toward the filth and stench they walk in, sit by, eat in and sleep in everywhere, every day.
President Akufo-Addo proclaimed that he will make Accra the cleanest city in Africa by 2020. It is 2019 and the country is more engulfed in filth and horrible stench, than ever before. I suspect we might just end up wearing nose masks like what pertains in some parts of Asia.
The conversations being had on radio and television channels about the filthy state of the country are usually based on three to four factors; Implementation of policy, the attitude of Ghanaians, not enough waste management companies and how citizens are not being educated on waste management.
Out of the factors named above, I will settle on the nonchalant attitude of Ghanaians toward filth as the most pressing, and one within the power of an individual to change.
I agree that the bigger policy environment should make it easy for all the pieces in the sanitation arena to fit together, but the right attitudes in my view could force policymakers to deal more decisively with sanitation than the lip service we see.
This essentially will be a bottom-up approach since the top-down ways of doing things have failed us.
What is the plan or policy on recycling waste? How are we dealing with the bigger issue of dumping sites and what sanction regime exists for people who flout basic sanitation laws? These are questions decision-makers and authorities must be answering.
However, what is immediately within our reach as a people is to adopt a change of attitude that will force our leaders to think and even feel embarrassed for not providing leadership on the matter of sanitation. I am not talking about the establishment of a Ministry!
My landlady is a clear example of the attitudinal problem Ghanaians have towards the disposal waste.
To me, this is the biggest hurdle we have to cross as a country before all other things fall in place.
She recently advised me to flip my refuse bag behind the wall. This was when she saw a black trash bag I kept refuse in, waiting on the waste collector to come for it.
You can imagine that her mentality is no different from the two ladies caught in that viral video throwing their refuse in the rain.
I mean, picture the consequences of me challenging my landlady to do the right thing and even going to the extent of telling her I will report her to the authorities.
I would be thrown out of her house the next moment.
Recently, on the Citi Breakfast Show, Bernard Avle interviewed a young man by name Razak. He is a dispatch rider who was trying to get someone to do the right thing, by picking up rubbish the person threw out of their moving vehicle onto the road at Ashaiman.
Narrating the story, Razak said at about 5:30 pm he was on his motorbike when he saw someone throwing rubbish out of a car.
He moved to where the car was and asked the driver to get out and pick the rubbish.
In the car was an Indian couple. It was the husband who had thrown the rubbish out of the car, so his wife asked him to get down and pick it up.
But the driver who was a Ghanaian, who should have demanded the right thing be done was rather furious at Razak, accusing him of being rude towards his employer. Can you imagine?
The driver then called the police to come to arrest Razak for being disrespectful to his boss.
In Razak’s own words, “the incident happened around 5:30 in the evening. I was on my motorbike when I saw someone throwing rubbish out of a car in traffic. I moved to where the car was and asked the driver to get out and pick up the rubbish, the driver attempted driving off when I blocked him.”
He continued, “there was an Indian couple in the car, so the wife asked her husband to get out of the car to pick the rubbish and that was when the driver got angry, saying I was shouting and being disrespectful towards his boss and called the police to come and arrest me.”
The case was eventually sorted out by the police, where no statements were taken from the parties and no arrest was made!
I bet Razak wasn’t the only one who saw what happened but as good citizens, we are supposed to watch out for things like this to put people in check and make sure the right things are done.
A recent incident on the Tema motorway received a lot of social media attention.
On June 24, 2019, Kofi Amoah shamed a foreign national for littering the Tema Motorway. He chased after a car to make sure the man involved walked back to pick up the bottle he had thrown on the road. He filmed the process and shared it on social media. The video went viral.
“I have travelled the world and how will you do that in any developed country,” he said of the man’s littering on the motorway.
“Every time I am riding [my motorbike] or I am driving, the cameras are rolling to see how we are making Ghana better or worse,” Kofi Amoah remarked on the Citi Breakfast Show.
“What we want to let Ghanaians know is that we can make Ghana better if we want to. Travelling across the world, we have realized that it is all about attitude and if we bring it down to Ghana, there is so much we are missing out on,” he observed.
Kofi Amoah describes himself as a citizen who is passionate about his environment and hopes his action will serve as a positive example for other Ghanaians.
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The point here is that there appear to be a few people who have decided to constitute themselves into the critical mass necessary to force attitudinal change. Their methods may be crude, but it appears to be working.
What is important is for others to learn from them, perhaps refine the approach a bit and push till we see a total change in attitude when it comes to sanitation matters. It should become embarrassing and uncomfortable for someone to litter.
My parting observations which are worrying are the following;
Ghanaians have become blind when it comes recognising that we are eventually being engulfed by filth. You will find people in the market sitting by or in front of a heap of stinky refuse and it is almost like they do not care. If we are to produce a clean environment, we must care about how well we keep our surroundings.
Also, it is easy and convenient to throw out refuse in the street when it is raining or when a car is moving, because the water will sweep the refuse further away. It is this collective sin that has largely contributed to the flooding disasters we have seen and the consequent loss of lives and property. It may not have affected you today, but soon it may be your turn. It is important we realise that our actions and inactions may lead to bigger problems.
Further, throwing out refuse behind walls onto a vast land covered with weeds and trees is not a big deal because there isn’t anyone to put you in check. Why can’t we be each other’s keeper and the keepers of our environment, because that’s a step to tackling the sanitation problem we have.
Throwing out an empty sachet of water anywhere is easy because the government hasn’t provided any bins around (that is always the excuse), why don’t you put it in your bag and dispose of it properly. Doing this will shape your attitude.
In conclusion, though many other factors responsible for the filth in our environment exist, we can begin by tackling the attitudinal head of it for starters. It may be beyond an ordinary citizen’s power to construct storm drains or set-up recycling plants to process the waste, but it is certainly within our means to offer a word or two to people who may not see the need to keep the environment clean, this could snowball and lead to something bigger and desirable. Let’s all get involved.