General News of 2012-09-19

Sanitation in Accra is far better than 4 years ago – Mayor

The Chief Executive of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, Dr. Alfred Oko Vanderpuije, is convinced there is a marked improvement in the sanitation situation in the capital.

He says the heaps of garbage that littered the city four years ago were all gone now, thanks to the hard work of his administration.

Dr. Vanderpuije was speaking on a wide range of issues on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show Tuesday.

He insisted that “if we want to assess where we are, we also have to compare it to where we have been; the question is where are we today versus where we [were] four years ago.”

“That sounds political,” sit-in host of the Super Morning Show, Bernard Nasara Sayibu reminded him but he maintained that “unless you are willing to assess yourself based on record, we will just be speaking on general terms.”

The AMA boss said the residents of the city appreciate the work he has done to clean the capital and rid it of the stacks of refuse that piled up in every corner of Accra.

“For example if you went to Mamprobi and you went to the sanitation grounds just close to the M1 Compound, we had a huge a mountain of refuse…if you went to Korlegono, if you went to Darkuman, if you went to La, all over the city, we had huge mountains of refuse,” he stated.

Given this situation, the government, according to him, initiated a hundred-day cleanup campaign under which all the mountains of garbage were cleared “and then after that we came up with the sanitation policy from the assembly which was geared towards collecting more refuse and putting modern, scientifically proven, best practices in place.”

Today, out of the 117,000 houses in Accra, he said, 91,000 houses had been registered under a polluter-pays policy and distributed 92,000 waste bins to foster an effective collection of waste by the nine registered waste collection companies.

He was however concerned about what he called the attitude of Ghanaians whom he said littered the streets without compunction.

He said the free range (open defecation) that pervaded the city has been tempered with by a policy initiative by the AMA which mandated every property owner to provide toilet facilities for their tenants.

According to him, 19,000 landlords have been prosecuted for failing to abide by the directive, an action he said had forced many residents to construct toilet facilities in their places of abode.

In addition to this, he said the Assembly was about finalizing plans to close the Lavender Hill, where untreated liquid waste is dumped directly into the sea and which was a subject of a hotline documentary by Joy FM’s Fiifi Koomson.

“We are also constructing a liquid waste treatment plant at Legon which will serve the University [of Ghana], IPS, Presec and its environs,” he added.

Whilst admitting that the sanitation challenges of Accra were not completely over, Dr. Vanderpuije asserted that the government had put in place effective measures to deal with the problem.