Let’s green Agbogbloshie, deal with e-waste problem – Otabil

Agbogbloshie, a filth-riddled part of Ghana’s infamous slum, Sodom and Gomorrah, is seen as the world’s largest dumpsite for toxic e-waste.

The 40-acre space is a massive receptacle for a potpourri of garbage of all sorts, including e-waste, which contain toxic chemicals.

Young scrap dealers are often seen, with their bare hands and without any protect clothing, dismantling e-waste at Agbogbloshie to harvest the metals in them. Copper, especially, is the ultimate reward.

Their unsafe handling of e-waste has a costly price. Most of them end up with burns, untreated wounds, eye damage, lung and back problems, chronic nausea, anorexia, head splitting headaches and respiratory problems. Some of them also die of cancer in their prime due to the toxic chemicals in the e-waste to which they exposed themselves.

Pastor Mensa Otabil, General Overseer of the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC), has his church located within the Agbogbloshie enclave, and thus worried about the infamy of the place and the inability of past and present Governments to help the situation by gentrifying the place.

At the 2014 Spring Board Road Show Convocation at Accra, Dr Otabil said numerous attempts by his Church to have City Authorities give the Church the green light to turn the enclave into a large garden of trees and greens have been fruitless.

“Recently I read an article that the Agbogbloshie area is the most toxic space on earth. That’s not funny because my church is close by. But that’s not funny because every day I see people carrying toxic waste and the toxic waste is driven from the Atlantic Ocean and goes straight to people’s houses at Adabraka, at Asylum Down, at Osu, at Kanda, at Ringway. If materials that have been certified as dangerous to humans come through our ports, end up in this place at Agbogbloshie and are disseminated into our homes every day, now you ask yourself why do we allow this to happen?

“And the reason I am concerned about is that when we moved our church to this area, there was nothing like that happening. And for 15 years, we hired architects, planners, drew plans, we supplied information to the Government, to the agencies responsible to say: ‘Let us grass this area, grass it, green it, a green part of 40 acres of land, just green it. Plant trees, put chairs under the trees and anytime government decides it wants to use this land for something, it can use, but don’t leave it naked. And in spite of our best efforts, we never got approval to green that land. Now it is killing people”.