The Greater Accra Regional Minister, Mr. Henry Quartey, this week cautioned the 898 men who have been deployed to ensure that Accra is clean, under the Operation Clean your Frontage Campaign, to stay away from extortion or lose their job. The ‘Operation Clean Your Frontage’ initiative aims to enforce sanitation regulation within the Greater Accra region. This is a good initiative that all residents of the nation’s capital must embrace.
The Chronicle welcomes the initiative and would want to inform the regional minister to crack the whip if any officer falls foul of the law, as he has warned. One of the major causes of flooding in the country and Accra to be specific has been attributed to indiscriminate disposal of solid waste. Reports indicate that about 12,710 tons of solid waste is generated daily with only 10% collected and appropriately disposed of at designated dumping sites.
It has also been reported that city authorities spend about GH¢6.7m annually on the collection and transport of waste for disposal and GH¢550,000 per month to pay waste contractors and for landfill maintenance.
Indiscriminate waste disposal, rapid population growth and urbanisation are some of the factors that have been associated with this improper management of waste. Other factors attributed to this problem are the lack of waste transportation system, low public awareness on the health consequences of poor waste management and weak enforcement of environmental regulations.
Among all these factors, we believe the one that if it handled well will really help curb sanitation issues in the country, is the enforcement of environmental regulations by our authorities. We say this because if our authorities are able to enforce the laws, people will not dump refuse anywhere and put the burden on city authorities to spend huge sums of money to construct expensive waste transport systems.
During the days where we had the town council taskforce (Tankas) parading our towns, cities and villages, effective disposal of solid waste was not a problem. This was as a result of the firmness with which these officers executed their jobs. People who needed to be arrested for littering or making their homes and surrounding dirty were not spared, whilst those who had to pay fines were made to do so. In fact the mere sight or mention of ‘Tankas’ saw everyone running helter-skelter to hide their solid and liquid waste that have not been disposed.
One will argue that the population size at the time is not the same as today, but irrespective of that, anyone who witnessed those good old days will attest to the fact that those officers brought some discipline into our communities.
For some years now, city authorities in Accra have tried to devise ways to drive away hawkers and traders from shop frontages and walk-ways designed for pedestrians. However, the city authorities have been unsuccessful in their attempt because the city guards were compromised and, therefore, lost the moral high ground in the fight to ward off hawkers from the streets.
This is why the caution given by Minister Quartey is in the right direction, since it will go a long way to deter the officers from extorting money from those they are supposed to exercise their authority over.
We hope that the Minister will go by his words and punish officers who disobey his orders. Accra must work again!
