The Minister of Local Government, Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs, Mahama Ayariga, has said Ghanaians will see visible results in the fight against poor waste management within a year.
“I am 100 per cent confident that President John Dramani Mahama will win the fight against waste in this country. Give us one year, and you will see the results,” he said.
The minister was speaking in his maiden appearance at the Government Accountability Series at the Jubilee House in Accra yesterday, when he outlined the government’s sanitation plans and the ministry’s wider decentralisation agenda.
Structural problems
Mr Ayariga said many Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) were struggling with sanitation because of structural deficits rather than a lack of will, and that it would be unfair to keep sanctioning them over the basics without fixing those challenges.
He said Accra had very few waste transfer stations, so tricycle operators who collected household waste often travelled 20 to 30 kilometres to find a transfer station or landfill.
“If somebody offers them a corner somewhere to dump the waste for a small fee, trust me, they will cut those corners,” he said, adding that “this fuels indiscriminate dumping.”
He described the state of landfills in the Greater Accra Region as dire.
He said the region, with a population of close to seven million, had only one landfill site, which he said “deserves to be immediately decommissioned”, but had remained in use for lack of an alternative.
The only engineered landfill available to the region, he said, was in the Eastern Region.
To fix the situation, Mr Ayariga said discussions were ongoing with the Minister of Finance, Dr Cassiel Ato Forson, to build at least three landfill sites and at least 36 transfer stations in Greater Accra.
He said the Land Use and Spatial Planning Authority (LUSPA) had completed the zonal demarcations, factoring in population densities, and had proposed locations for the three landfills.
He said the President had also directed him to explore incineration facilities so that waste would be burnt rather than only dumped, to avoid running out of landfill space again in a few years.
The new landfills would be smaller than traditional sites because the government plans to add landfill gas-to-energy technology, so that very little waste is finally disposed of there.
He said the Finance Minister had promised to support the plan.
National sanitation strategy
Mr Ayariga said work was advanced on a nationwide sanitation strategy.
The Finance Minister, he said, was awaiting the full cost of building engineered landfills in all regional capitals: three for Greater Accra and two each for Greater Kumasi and Sekondi Takoradi.
He said the Finance Ministry was also awaiting costings for transfer stations in every MMDA.
The programme, he said, would finance waste collection vehicles, tricycles and household bins, and would be paid for ultimately through household fees for waste lifting, collected through an automated payment system.
Mr Ayariga said the aim was to cut household spending on waste evacuation while making it more convenient by using existing industry players and creating room for more women.
The ministry expects to create not less than 20,000 permanent jobs in waste management and the circular economy.
He said the strategy would also insist on waste separation from the home through to the transfer station and
