Opinions of Saturday, 22 September 2007
Columnist: Akosah-Sarpong, Kofi
Emefa Mohammed, writing at www.ghanaweb.com in response to the commencement of Ghana’s National Sanitation Week on September 13, said that “sanitation should be a daily affair not some one week photo ops/political point scoring agenda.” That exposed faults in national sanitation policies and captures the lack of holistic policy that informs the designing of the national sanitation policy. While the National Sanitation Week may be a public relations blurb to raise awareness for the acute sanitation problems facing Ghana, the content of the campaign is not fuller enough – a serious gap for a life-and-death matter, most Ghanaians die from malaria-related diseases, which are basically due to poor sanitation practices.
While there may be new attempts to resolve the perennial sanitation problems such as the re-institution of “sama sama,” a local parlance for sanitary inspectors that was the case during the colonial times and early periods after independence, and the broadening of public health education campaigns to include the National Youth Employment Programme, key traditional institutions to maintain the sanitation campaigns are missing, making the venture unsustainable in the long term. The lack of input of traditional institutions such as Kings, Queens, Paramount Chiefs, traditional healers/herbalists, shrines and oracles, traditional midwives, village heads, ethnic associations, among others, reveal that the sanitary regulations driving the new sanitation campaigns are not realistic, not holistic, unGhanaian, and do not reflect the true sanitation challenges facing Ghana today. This makes the ensuing waste management policies and the resources invested to push it unsustainable in the long term, thus making the possibility of Ghana returning to the current appalling sanitation situation it is trying to deal with. For while Ghanaians were convinced that the historical sanitary inspectors should be brought back to help contain the worsening sanitation situation, it remains to be seen whether the same Ghanaians, whose sanitation life-style brought about the inexcusable sanitary situation, will accord them the necessary respect, more accurately, the necessary co-operation, like their traditional institutions, to carry out the enforcement of public sanitary regulations. “Poor sanitation is our own making. Because of indiscipline, waste, especially plastic waste, is choking our gutters while weeds are taking over our surroundings,” Vice President Aliu Mahama correctly said. Mr. Mahama, ever confident, is right. But being right is one thing and seeing the results on the ground another. The suspicion results from lack of broader input of traditional institutions that are to back-up and sustain the sanitation inspectors, who are to not only to mount public education but also enter citizens’ homes to check whether they are undertaking sound sanitary practices.