Volunteers poised to tidy up the environment
The Member of Parliament (MP) for Madina Constituency in the Greater Accra Region (GAR) has given his backing to the La-Nkwantanang Municipal Assembly to prosecute people who are found littering in the municipality to ensure the president Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s dream of making Accra, the cleanest city in the West African sub-region.
According to the MP who is also the Minister of Sate at the Office of the Vice President, the actions of certain politicians, influential people and chiefs, pleading on behalf of sanitation offenders is fast derailing the efforts of the Assembly in the fight against filth.
Abu-Bakar Saddique Boniface, said these actions on the part of these influential personalities in the municipality has been a hinderance in the fight against littering and filth, in spite of the efforts being made by the Assembly to make Madina and its environs one of the cleanest.
‘’There are laws against littering in the country and these by- laws of the Assemblies must be evoked to ensure sanity in the environment’’ the MP suggests.
The Minister of State at the presidency gave his backing to the Assembly’s actions in the fight against littering, when he kicked starts his monthly clean -up exercise to mark this year’s ‘Worker’s Day’ celebrations in Accra.
He said the issues of filth in the Madina municipality, arguably one of the fastest growing municipalities with the large number of peri-urban areas in the region is almost becoming a security issue.
The Minister’s maiden monthly clean-up exercise was organized in collaboration with the La-Nkwantanang Municipal Assembly and heavily supported by Zoomlion Waste Management Services Limited and the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS).
He added that the monthly clean-up exercise forms part of his sanitation plan to engage with the residents and market women and men to observe cleanliness in the municipality.
He stressed that every last Saturday of the month will be observed as ‘a day of cleanliness’ in the municipality with a clean-up exercise to encourage people to come out and clean their environments.
He stressed that it was no mean saying when the’ Holy Bible’ indicated that cleanliness is next to godliness adding that, it shows the kind of premium the Holy Bible places on people keeping their environments clean.
He said cleanliness ensures a healthy environment adding that with the little clean-up exercise embarked on in the municipality from the Zongo Junction through to the Madina-Market and Melcom areas, people are now breathing clean air as there is some semblance of freshness in the air.
He admitted that because there are no proper means of getting rid of filth in the municipality people find it; easy to dump filth in the open drains, thereby compounding the sanitation situations in the municipality.
According to him; Madina sometime back, was always top on the District Assemblies League Table but the same cannot be said of the Madina municipality in recent times.
The Assembly is nowhere near the top because of the attitudes of indiscriminate littering being recorded in the area he posited.
The MP took the opportunity to commend the management of Zoomlion and the management of GNFS for their support for the exercise and reminded the support staffs of Zoomlion to continue to make themselves available for the exercise anytime they are called upon.
On her part; the Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) for La-Nkwantanang Municipal Assembly (LaNMA), Jenifer Dede Afadzadzi says the Assembly is not relenting on its mandate to ensure that the by-laws of the Assembly adhered to by the people.
She says the Assembly has deviced measures to ensure that the ceremonial streets in the municipality are kept clean after the recent decongestion exercise.
According to her, by cleaning the streets daily and providing litter bins at vantage points as well as educating the residents to do the right things coupled with prosecution of sanitation offenders, hopefully attitudes will change.
She appealed to residents to be on the look- out for people who steal the liter bins provided by the Assembly in the late hours of the night.
‘’Just last month, twenty -three sanitation offenders were arrested and put before the Municipal Court part of the Assembly’s ant-littering exercise’’ she said.
The governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) Chairman for Madina Constituency, Eric Nartey Yeboah, in a remark called on the residents to stay united and show readiness whenever, they are called upon for such clean-up exercises in the municipality.
