Cecilia Dapaah insists 'Accra generally clean'

Sanitation Minister Cecilia Dapaah has said Accra is generally clean.

While answering a question posed to her on the floor of parliament about the sanitation situation in the capital city, Mrs Dapaah said: “There will always be challenges as the population grows and people migrate. Yes, there are challenges and I extensively brought to the floor some of these challenges when I briefed the House.

“For instance, the honourable member was speaking about last week’s rain, the plastics are under the Ministry of Science, Environment, and Technology and the dredging is also under the ambit of the Ministry of Works and Housing.”

“The Ministry for Works and Housing went around the city and visited the Aslyum down area and I know he is also giving contracts for drain dredging and I believe the Minister is capable of finding the needed solution but generally, I can say Accra is clean,” she said.

President Nana Akufo-Addo promised to make Accra the cleanest city in Africa by the end of his first tenure of office.

On the eve of Christmas in 2019, the flag bearer of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr John Mahama, said the Sanitation Ministry is a “useless” outfit which he would scrap in his second coming.

Due to its uselessness, the national capital, Accra, has become the “dirtiest” city in West Africa, the former President said.

“Accra has become the dirtiest city, I think, in the whole of West Africa,” Mr Mahama told journalists and Ghanaians in a live Facebook address on Tuesday, 24 December 2019.

In Mr Mahama’s view, Abuja and Abidjan, the capital cities of Nigeria and The Ivory Coast, “look cleaner than Accra”.

According to Mr Mahama, “If the President had taken it [Sanitation Ministry] as one of his promises, then he has failed very badly, especially for the fact that you have a sanitation minister, you cannot understand what the sanitation minister is doing.”

Should he win the 2020 elections, Mr Mahama said: “We will move the sanitation ministry back to Local Government”, adding: “I think it is one of the most useless ministries”.

“It hasn’t proven itself, it has not achieved anything in the last three years, so, we will move it back to the Local Government Ministry. We will put a deputy minister there who we will empower to make sure that the district assemblies are doing the right thing, and that they are surcharging people who keep their compound dirty or who do not keep their surroundings clean.”