The once vibrant sanitation day exercise that saw citizens actively and collectively involved in ridding their surroundings of filth seem to have slowed down in recent times.
The suggestion has been that the government through the various assemblies nationwide that previously spearheaded the program, have scrapped it.
But the Accra Metropolitan Assembly has denied that the exercise has been scrapped.
The Chief Sustainability Resilience Advisor for the Assembly, Desmond Appiah, in an interview with Citi News said the AMA is in the position to support communities that mobilize people to embark on the exercise.
He observed that most people rather than taking the lead to clean, lay back and bring out their domestic waste expecting the assembly to collect them and clean as well but the assembly does not encourage that.
“It hasn’t stopped. The sanitation day is not supposed to be done by the assembly, it is supposed to be done by citizens so the assembly supports. So in a situation where it has become that people close their shops so they wait for the assembly to come and clean and they bring out their waste on that day for the assembly to collect, that is not the system that we want to [encourage]. We want to put focus on enforcement,” he said.
The sanitation day exercise was in the past years a major national event that had political actors and government officials massively involved but that is not the current situation.
In previous years, every first Saturday of the month was declared a National Sanitation day that saw most shops closed and limited commercial transportation activities from morning to noon to ensure that people partake in some cleaning exercise in their communities.