Address sanitation challenges immediately - OccupyGhana tells government

Civil society group OccupyGhana has called on the government to immediately take steps to address what it calls “the filth engulfing the country”.

A statement issued by the group in Accra called on the government “to rigidly enforce our laws regarding littering the environment, refuse disposal and open defecation, and charge and prosecute offenders.”

“We see no reason why the laws should not be strictly enforced and offenders punished. We urge the MMDAs and Ghana Police to enforce them without delay”, they said.

“We urge the Government, acting through the MMDAs, to confront this menace before the impending rainy season, which comes with diseases such as cholera, a direct consequence of poor sanitation. OccupyGhana® is convinced that as a people we should ingrain the practice of keeping our surroundings clean on a continuous basis and not restrict it to periodic nationwide cleanup exercises”, they added.

Here is the full statement:

OccupyGhana® has noted with concern the huge swathes of plastic and other solid and human waste engulfing our country, especially our capital. It is rapidly reaching an alarming state and photographs taken after the recent downpour in parts of Accra in the morning of Wednesday 14th February 2018 have thrown this looming and potentially disastrous health and security problem into sharp focus.

We have also been monitoring how the matter of sanitation is being addressed by Government and we are concerned about Government’s commitment to resolve it.

It appears that in spite of the establishment of the new Ministry of Sanitation & Water Resources, little has been done to confront and remove the filth engulfing our country. The reality is that by the Local Governance Act, 2016 (Act 936) and its predecessor statute, issues of sanitation are to be handled by the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Authorities (MMDAs). There are also the provisions of the Community Water and Sanitation Agency Act, 1998 (Act 564), and the functions assigned to that Agency. This legislative dilemma is compounded by the Environmental Sanitation provisions under Part Five of the Public Health Act, 2012 (Act 851), falling within the remit of the Ministry of Health. We, therefore have doubts as to what the Ministry will do and achieve when it technically has no legislative mandate to handle sanitation anywhere in the country unless its role is to coordinate the activities of all the legislatively-mandated bodies on issues of sanitation.

We have taken note of the National Sanitation Campaign launched by the President in November 2017, which does not appear to have made any real impact in resolving the problem yet. Under this campaign, there were to be: