Cleanliness they say is next to godliness.
Filth, dirt, odour and smell everywhere; on our streets, in our gutters, in the sea and on every corner of the capital city.
I see garbage piled up everywhere. Stained clothes are for a wash but who cares for the garbage?
We say we love our country but no one is available to step forward and do the needful. We have all turned a blind eye to the filth decorating our streets.
Until we change our attitude towards sanitation, nature will have no other alternative than revenge.
Sanitation is one of the difficult problems that this part of our world is trying to solve. Over the past years, efforts have been made by different government administrations to usher the country into a proper level of sanitation. Some time ago, law enforcers were made to arrest people who littered indiscriminately.
The Britannica dictionary defines sanitation as the process of keeping places free from dirt, infection, disease, etc., by removing waste, trash, garbage and cleaning the streets, etc.
In April 2017, His excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo promised to make Accra the cleanest city in Africa before he ends his first term in office.
Quoting verbatim, “The commitment we are making and which I want you all to make with me is that by end of my four-year term, Accra is going to be the cleanest city in Africa,’’ he stated.
World Health Organisation (W.H.O) generally refers sanitation to as the provision of facilities and services for the safe disposal of human urine and faeces. According to W.H.O report in 2017 states that 2.0 billion people still do not have basic sanitation amenities such as toilets or latrines and about 673 million still practice open defecation.
Sanitation and waste management is a major problem in developing countries from which Ghana is not excluded.
According to the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (2006), sanitation in Accra can best be described as unsatisfactory and is characterized by choked drains, indiscriminate waste disposal and overflowing waste containers, especially in poor neighbourhoods of the city. The problem of poor sanitation is still in existence.
This situation can be attributed to a number of factors which includes, lack of adequate sanitary facilities, ignorance and irresponsibility of citizens, congested population size, rapid springing up of unauthorized structures, lack of regular budgetary allocation for sanitation and the virtual absence of fee-based service provision in low-income areas (AMA 2006).
The effects of poor urban sanitary conditions and waste management on the well-being of residents are often expressed in health and environmental terms. Healthwise consequences, children are the most vulnerable and environmental consequences are the destruction of property and lives.
I remember how heavy rainfall in June 2022 triggered flooding in some parts of Accra. Some homes, shops, and roads were flooded and several vehicles were stranded in floodwaters. Let’s not talk about 2015, June 3 disaster. Memories of how people struggled on that fateful day amid a strange fire and a heavy rainfall sadden my heart.
Innocent persons struggling for their lives in a greasy flood of which some lost their lives. The scars of the affected people tell the story of the social consequences of poor sanitation.
Let us as a nation reflects on the series of disasters that have occurred in the country as a result of poor sanitation and change our attitudes towards Sanitation for a better future.
