We must re-think the national sanitation strategy
A well-constructed national sanitation programme will certainly enhance preventive health because a clean environment makes it difficult for the outbreak of diseases such as cholera that claimed more than 200 lives and infected about 30,000 people nationwide recently.
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Last Saturday was the third in the series of National Sanitation Day (NSD) programme and, like the ones before, it was poorly patronised.
We have lauded the idea in the past, but then we asked whether the NSD is sustainable.
That question is relevant today.
We believe that it will be difficult, with the resources at our disposal, for the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development to co-ordinate the nationwide exercise, during which we expect every Tom, Dick and Harry to be out every first Saturday of the month to clean gutters, weed the surroundings and sweep the streets.
If half of the population turns out for such an exercise, there will certainly be a stampede.
But having observed the day over the past three months, it will be appropriate for the authorities to go back to the drawing board and review the initiative. We do not want to behave like those who, in their desire to kill an initiative, give it a bad name in order to hang it.
However, there will be the need for a broader stakeholder engagement involving chiefs, market women, other traders, transport unions, district assemblies, assembly members and communities in order to factor their concerns into the implementation of the exercise.
In the past, communal labour was a regular exercise in every community, even though the central government had its role in the development process.
Town development committees (TDCs), led by chiefs, cleaned their communities regularly.
Members of the security agencies cleaned their barracks very regularly through the exercise they called “fatigue”.
Unfortunately, the development challenge in Ghana is that we have abandoned our values and rejected the endeavours that helped us to stand tall as the Black Star of Africa.
It is sad to note that although the district assemblies have very elaborate bye-laws that penalise those who degrade the environment, the culprits are always let off the hook.
Time and again, people have advocated the return to ‘Saman-Saman’ or ‘Tankasi’ when people whose actions or inaction degraded the environment will be summoned before a legally constituted entity which will adjudicate and penalise those culpable.
The solution to society’s ills is the return to those values and the enforcement of regulations and laws to deter deviants from making life uncomfortable for all.
The Daily Graphic is not oblivious of the challenges imposed on us by a growing population or urbanisation, but today refuse collection has become a big business involving multi-million companies, including Zoomlion.
Also, the trash, including plastic bags, can easily be transformed into cash through recycling. But in our case, it has become a nuisance and a health risk.
We ought to look at what use we can put the tonnes of plastic bags on the streets if we cannot ban their use, so that they can provide livelihoods for our teeming youth.
We are not suggesting in the least that we should discard efforts at maintaining a clean environment. Our only concern is that the present arrangement is not working, for which reason we should return to the drawing board and look at the actions that will give us the results of a clean environment.
This is an imperative, so that we do not turn an otherwise laudable NSD into an organised waste of time.