Cash on the banks of a river

The struggle to keep body and soul together in one of Accra’s most populated suburbs has compelled young men to engage in a laborious business chain of scrap dealership which sees them deserting their make-shift sleeping structures before dawn and returning late in the evening to convert their search results into cash.

Hundreds of squatters are taking advantage of the flourishing scrap metal business to make huge sums of money from buying and selling the scrap metals behind the Agbogbloshie end of the Odaw River in the centre of the capital. Curiously, not a fraction of their ‘gastronomic’ cash  makes its way directly into the national kitty as taxes.

Stationed behind the river bank between the Graphic Road and the onion market, about 500 young squatters count and weigh their scrap metals “catch” for the day, while others bag onions and tubers of yam to sell on the street to motorists.

They constantly create a lot of mess by dumping all manner of waste, including scrap metals that are not sellable, old fridges, electronic waste and faecal waste, among many others, into the already dead river to choke it. In the end, even though they do not pay anything directly to the government, the state has to use scarce resources from taxpayers to dredge the river occasionally and give it a semblance of neatness. GB