Despite numerous efforts to ensure sanitation in the capital, the city is still replete with filth, a major contributor to perennial flooding that cost many lives.
Tonnes of garbage are threatening to swallow up residents of Accra.
Along the coast, in the markets and, on the streets, a worrying picture emerges.
But there comes a glimmer of hope, the buz stop boys who are poised to change the narrative to restore the beauty of Accra.
For over ten months, they have visited targeted locations in Accra and cleared those spaces of filth.
Founder and leader of the Buz Stop Boys, Heneba Kwadwo Safo, expressed worry in a TV3 interview about the human behaviour that contributes to the large amount of waste.
“On countless times, I get to the beach and I become sad because you see debris and plastics all over in the sea. I always wondered how that happened. I realised that in order to solve that problem, we had to start from the communities where the waste originate from.”
“You go to the market, where we buy our foodstuff, and you see an old person comfortably seated by a heap of waste and selling,” Safo lamented.
The sanitation challenge in Accra has many sides, with the lack of adequate sanitation courts and logistics blamed.
Environmental health officer and Director of Public Health of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, Florence Kuukyi, says city authorities are rolling out strategies to deal with the menace.
“I can say the city authorities are doing their best but the individuals living in the city are not helping. We build homes and forget to build toilet facilities. Toilet is part of sanitation; that is liquid waste management,” she observed.
Pledge to make Accra cleanest city in Accra
President Akufo-Addo in 2017 pledged to make Accra the neatest and best city in Africa by the end of his first term in office.
“The commitment we are making and which I want you all to make with me is that by the time we end our four-year term, Accra is going to be the cleanest city in Africa,” he stated.
President Akufo-Addo said the beauty of the national capital had deteriorated over the years as a result of various human activities that had destroyed the once glorious city.
He recalled that when he was growing up in Accra, the Jamestown area was the centre of the city, but said history had taken that away from the good people of the area.
“In our time, we are going to bring back the glory of Jamestown and British Accra,” he stressed.
This promise resonated with the public and gave many people hope that at least the new NPP government was poised to set everything right in the country.
To sanitation watchers, it was a right signal to citizens to keep their environment clean.
But that was not achieved, and still has not been realised.
In 2019, former Sanitation Minister Cecelia Dapaah realising that the promise could not be achieved extended the deadline to 2024.
At a press conference, she said “Insha Allah, the President will go for two terms, and at the end, Accra would have been, and we are on course, God is in control, and the battle is still the Lord’s. And to tell you that His Excellency the President is so serious with this call to all of us to make Accra the cleanest city…”
It is part of the reasons many have questioned the initiative of the Buz Stop Boys, wondering whether it is going to be sustainable.
“For the purposes of sustainability, that is why we are pushing for education. Our interest is just not cleaning because if we continuously clean and after 10 years nothing changes then everything we have done is practically a waste of time,” Heneba Safo noted.
Calls for attitudinal change
Appearing before Parliament’s Appointments Committee, Sanitation Minister nominee, Lydia Alhassan, called for attitudinal change in achieving the dream to make Accra the cleanest city in Africa.
She said she would not rate the President’s target but rather focus on how Ghanaians would change their way of doing things and leave everything, including cleaning their environment, to the government.
“Provisions have been made, all the infrastructure investments have been made. What we have is attitudinal, the persons… to ensure that we keep our environment, our workplaces, the market, wherever we find ourselves, to ensure that we all join in this noble call to achieve the purpose or the target that the President has set not only for himself but for us all.”
“I will say that it’s not really about the President. It’s about us, it is about Ghanaians’ attitude towards cleaning Accra,” Lydia Alhassan stated.
But Florence Kuukyi believes there is a structural defect that needs urgent fixing.
“There is a structural defect that needs to be joined together for us to see a good environmental health and sanitation in Ghana; either than that, we will fight and always come to ground zero,” she argued.
Activities of the Buz Stop Boys do not come without challenges.
“The biggest has been the tools or equipment we use to get the job done and our greatest worry is where to deposit the trash,” Safo indicated.
Some residents, who volunteer to help the Buz Stop Boys in cleaning up Accra, shared their motivations.
“Many a time we wait for the assembly members, for the government, Sanitation Ministry to be taking up all these things but we create the problem. My general message to everyone is that you can start from your home and start the change there,” some said.
The dream of making Accra the cleanest city remains a gradual process, one that requires targeted measures to achieve.