Pres. Mahama Marries Poor Sanitation & Corruption 1

Is it not sickeningly reprehensible for a country’s sitting president to openly entreat his subjects to clean up the environments they have been living in past days beyond recall?

Very likely!

What is its name?

The National Sanitation Day!

Where is the National Anti-Corruption Day, the other Siamese twin of the National Sanitation Day? We may recall that in the second installment of our series, “A New Direction for Ghanaian Journalism,” we witnessed a metaphoric matrimony take hold between two likely friends, very tight of course, poor sanitation and the epidemic of corruption. The exercise of argumentation was not merely a static abstraction or a motile instructional frivolity for public digestion. It was more than that. The matrimonial nexus had an ethereal touch of reification. Even so, we stretched the diagnostic thread of our provocative hypothesis to a metaphysical possibility of useful matrimony between the sullied mindsets of politicians and the specter of poor sanitation! In the main, let us not dare underestimate the mystical power of that link for the sake of argument, not even under pain of death. This is not merely one of the factual codicils of the actualities of life, rather it represents one of the eloquent inner cores of the substantialities of life.

Thus, our primordial question repeats itself endlessly: Must a sitting president tell his all-knowing people to take environmental hygiene serious? We have neither an easy nor a straight answer. Not that we have any particular reservations with President John Mahama’s public entreatment, except to call immediate attention to his statement’s implications for the national docket on institutional lapses, a query pertaining to the political problematic of double standard. We do know for a fact that the people cannot entreat parliamentarians, members of the judiciary, office of the presidency, and other managers of the state to do likewise as the people’s leadership’s privileged existence is of a different, separate world, a world certainly not of the earthly type. That elitist world is an absolutely clean plate for the bourgeois, the ruling, thieving class that has lost its purchase on its inner controls. The ruling class, by virtue of its privileged station in society realized through the people’s franchise, sees dirt as the exclusive ownership of the proletariat, the poor masses.

Accordingly, it is an easy tendency for the ruling class to frame its bourgeois worldview in a highfalutin language, an aloof, illogical poetry of twisted political gait and wholesome rhetorical self-righteousness. These shameless, unkind politicians have servants at the ready to keep their homes away from the manipulative scourge of environmental grime, all paid for through the hopeful largesse of the public purse. Thus, the people alone cannot be faulted for the negative echoes of environmental dereliction, with the proviso that it takes two, not three, to tango. Yet, the poor masses cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the material reality of another social fact, that their gullible victimhood owes its existence to the culture of poverty if they so decide to exercise their franchise in a manner unbefitting of the psychological dynamics of their collective welfare.

Consequently, the presential generosity of dirt cannot lay exclusive claim to the functional character of the proletariat if members of the proletariat exercise their franchise judiciously and if they hold their leadership responsible for egregious official improprieties, malfeasances. Still, the vital issue for us may not be so much a problem of a dearth of waste management strategies as of a lack of direction, not honoring payments to waste collectors, public apathy to environmental consciousness, and not enforcing standing regulations on the part of public officials and public institutions. On the other hand, the president’s precatory rhetoric aimed at the public is not offensive in the least in the wake of the cholera epidemic, and the human casualties thereof, including the stigma etched into the fabric of national psychology. It is also not true that cleanliness is next to godliness. In fact cleanliness is not the epitome of godliness. Cleanliness is godliness.

The next question is how to tackle the question of environmental cleanliness, a problem of the mind. What must be done is encouraging the rigorous study of the theoretical and practical rudiments of health science at all levels of primary education. Our proposition could even be extended to senior secondary and university education since it is not only children who live in filthy communities. Here, we advance another hypothesis in which health education is seen as important as pitting public psychology against the social-political practice of corruption, with the didactics of health education undertaken alongside the theories of social health, environmental health, spiritual health, intellectual health, and emotional health. What we are, in effect, saying here is that instructional irradiation of students with environmental consciousness must take full cognizance of the total needs of the constitution of individuality or of community, for a human being is more the sum total of anatomy and physiology and a community more than the sum total of human beings and institutions.

Back to the president’s environmental cleanliness request: It is only proper that seriousness is given to the request by public psychology from the standpoint of public health. Generally, social antipathy toward public hygiene, in and of itself, represents an important member of the litany of confounding variables feeding the equation of poor public sanitation, one of the major challenges to the intellectual presence of environmental consciousness. Population growth also confounds waste management problems. With population growth, public demand for goods and services increases proportionately and so does the volume of waste. Regrettably, exponential accretion in waste does not share in the social concomitance of waste management technology in the Ghanaian local context. Poorly managed landfills and shrinking acreages throughout the country’s major cities due to population growth and urbanization complicate the problem further.

Electronic and plastic waste, de-afforestation and charcoal-making activities, lumbering, mining, oil drilling, and greenhouse emissions compound problems related to the political economy of public sanitation. Moreover, with Ghana’s oil discovery in advanced stages of exploitation, we need to exercise a healthy suspicion against technological encroachments, technocratic practices such as hydraulic fracturing. E-waste management strategies may help ease the social dilemma of poor public sanitation but, alas, Ghana may not be up to the difficult task yet. One wonders how much surveillance efforts Ghana’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has, thus far, invested in intelligence strategies to arrest syndicate-related importation of banned materials into the country, with the poltergeist of public corruption running helter-skelter all over the place. Therefore, investment in waste management strategies has no hope of survival or fruition under universal oversight of institutional corruption.

What's more, cholera may be a winding, unfolding sequel to poor public sanitation but no one can deny other health complications and pollution-related illnesses that potentially can result from poor public sanitation. Composting and recycling are two remediation techniques yet their effective implementation is seriously hampered by the continued importation of non-recyclable materials into the country. Power outage constitutes another key countervailing whiplash against the potential success of implementing an advanced recycling technology. The health and environmental hazards of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and potential ones from possible new technologies associated with the so-called Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) have not been adequately assessed, if at all, by Ghanaian policy makers and scientists.

The point of the matter is that, local scientific and technological expertise is conspicuously lacking in public management formulae with regard to vigorous appraisal of the full weight of imported political-economic arrangements on the psychology of national development, as any progressive nation-state would at least have done as part of her refrains of strategic ascertainment.

However, we shall not overemphasize the notion that institutional oversight of these variables constitutes a serious threat to the strategic calculus of practical remediation regimina. Arguably, public solidarity does not present itself as a formidable moral force against the fulminatory fist of social injustice. The adaptable deceptions of charismatic authority, public apathy, and institutional weakness have conspired to deny national organization tactical progress. This is why filth and garbage could pile up so high, so tall, and everywhere, as in the rising topography of sedimentary rocks from the forlorn face of the earth and in the expanding corruptible roadmap of public consciousness. It is regrettable that we do not, even as a country, see a need to address proper land management techniques and potential benefits of land economy to the dire social consequences of population growth, urbanization, globalization, and multinational or corporate irresponsibility as it pertains to mineral and oil exploration.

This is where the appropriate institutions come in. The Ministry of Lands, Forestry, and Mines and the Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation have to be ahead of the curve in terms of technology development as well as of progressive land management policies. These two ministries, more especially the latter, have to collaborate with Ghana Standards Authority (GSA) to develop appropriate technologies and their sequent verification standards for successful implementation. Quality control and quality assurance techniques should be deemed symptomatic of the technological idiom of modernity by the Ghanaian public, of which both require profound expertise in mature operational effectuation and in the expressive power of scientific language in respect of marked managerial presence across oversight institutions. Efficient recycling technologies for waste management, capable technologies for water purification purposes across the country, particularly the rural areas, and sustainable controls for food safety are urgently required for strengthening the curative hands of public health.

Most significantly, it is not as if some of these activities are not already being taken care of via institutional exertion. Of course they certainly are. Our only fear is that the malignancy of public corruption threatens the operational viabilities of these ministries and the readiness of public psychology to contribute to practical implementation of waste management strategies. An additional problem points to the fact that Ghanaians are generally not willing to pay for new technologies designed for waste management, for instance. Unfortunately, Ghanaians may be justified to some extent given the alarming rate at which political corruption and other malfeasances deplete state coffers. That directly brings us full circle to the hard, tricky question of the other coterminous proposition, the National Anti-Corruption Day. What if President Mahama had entreated Ghanaians to come out in droves in search of corrupt public officials and corrupt institutions?

Is cleaning up the environment not as physically important as morally cleansing the country of public corruption? Where is the authoritative voice of moral outrage against universal corruption in Ghana? Indeed, the masses should have demanded this too, the National Anti-Corruption Day, the very same day the president issued a public proclamation for social observance of the National Sanitation Day. Sanitizing the filthy environment of national politics is as scientifically imperative as morally sanitizing the filthy environment of human physical habitation. So, is national tendency toward public hygiene not as significant, even justifiable, as national calls for moral hygiene? As a matter of fact, the National Anti-Corruption Day should be proactively observed year-round, with official and non-official corrupt personalities alike dragged into the pugilistic court of public opinion and doused in the acidic indictments of moral, judicial, and penal lynching.

Executing the requirements of the National Anti-Corruption Day should assume a moral vista far beyond the patronizing station of citizens in society. There are other critical problems worth drawing attention to in the larger context of strategic remediation analysis. It is no doubt that Ghana is already a caste system, the political-economic class versus the poor masses. The laws of the land have been imprisoned in animated suspension for the former, while the same laws are vigorously enforced in the case of the former. The political-economic class is known to hide itself behind the iron curtain of double standard in its elitist dealings with the poor masses. That, of course, is the devious nature of politics. It is not in question that political exigencies sometimes conflate with the devious nature of politics. Alas, the people are not even conscious that while they openly allow political ethnocentrism and ethnic nationalism to tear them apart in defense of their political patrons, opposition and incumbency, plot in secret to plunder state coffers as well as to share other national spoils among themselves and with their cronies without regard to the social-economic concerns of their obsequious political praise-singers, their useful idiots.

In other words, the lazy political-economic elites care more about themselves, their families, and their cronies than about the hardworking people who merely barter their conscience and franchise for social-economic crumbs. One wonders why the masses have consistently failed to see past the grimy plate of social-economic crumbs extended them by their thieving political patrons. Besides, the masses are not aware that the political leverage of their franchise carries more institutional and moral weight than the Bank of Ghana, the judiciary, office of the presidency and parliament combined. Not even the mineral wealth of Ghana comes close, not even asymptotically. Moreover, while the two major political parties have seen fit to establish two private ministries, called Ministry of Corruption, per party to promote internal political corruption at all levels of Ghana’s political landscape, award each other professional certificates for perfecting the industry of political corruption, and invest stolen public money in the future of their descendants and members of their extended families, the masses dabble in the stupor of scientific, technological and environmental agnosy, and in superstition, failing to acknowledge the moral superiority of their franchise as a powerful bargaining chip with their thieving straphanger politicians.

Remediation techniques are ineffective without tactical accommodation of the cancerous proliferation of public corruption alongside its effective extirpation or minimization. Managerial proaction and technocratic prioritization call for this. In the end, Ghanaians want to see past the lip service of their leaders for that matter. These straphanger politicians must therefore learn to respect the inquisitional voice of the people. The simmering voice of the people forever indicts the political shenanigans of their straphanger leadership, hoping to see campaign promises transubstantiate into practical effectuation of material and spiritual comfort. This Shangri-la has not arrived yet due to bad leadership, gross mismanagement of national wealth, and public insouciance. It is not a mere happenstance that Burkina Faso, a neighborly fixture on Ghana’s geopolitical pate, would gift Ghana’s leadership a contiguous precedent, of what it is that leadership’s fate will become if it consistently ignores the people’s clamorous demands for social justice, for moral self-appraisal in the midst of the rampancy of corruption scandals and leadership ineptness.

We can only hope that public angst toward political incompetence does not transform into volcanic rejection of government mandate, as happened in Burkina Faso, if the current trend of moral decay does not dissolve in popular inquisitional conflagration of instant demise. This is not a damning augury. This augury has a limited to no prospect of instantiation if the private sector and government and Ghanaians come together to work toward attainment of the common good, among other progressive objectives including enhancing standard of living and quality of life, improving and expanding public services throughout the country, backing up the so-called National Sanitation Day with appropriate infrastructures and universal attitudinal change on the part of Ghanaians. There is no doubt that a positive correlation possibly exists between mass poverty and poor environmental hygiene. Both mass poverty and poor environmental hygiene overlap with standard of living, quality of life, and attitude.

We believe improved living conditions, coupled with popular attitudinal change, environmental consciousness, scientific and technological emancipation of public psychology, can repress the geyser of public anger and sustain public health in the process! These indices should drive policy decisions with respect to the National Sanitation Day and to other such national preoccupations. One wonders why humans with supposedly superior intelligence freely evacuate, urinate, and expectorate in the open, flouting all other public or social conventions of decency, while the Scarab Beetle, alternatively known as the Dung Beetle, is actively engaged in ecological sanitization, clearing human feces and animal dung just to make the environment healthier for the habituation of man and other animals. Thus, Ghanaians could take a cue from the Dung Beetle’s proactive sense of environmental hygiene. Ghanaians should also resist their straphanger leadership’s sybarite lifestyles as well, thus loosening up the grip of political corruption on the breathing hyoid of national progress.

Finally, Ghanaian scientists should consider the potential of biomass combustion to convert feces into biodiesel (biofuel) and fertilizer, thereby limiting human contact with fecal micro-organisms. Cholera comes to mind. Moreover, the possibility of converting human urine into electricity is in its early stage of research and development as of this writing (See also Jonathan Kalan’s BBC March 14, 2014 article “Is Pee-Power Really Possible?”). Let us look at all the available technological and scientific avenues for improving the political economy of waste management!

We shall return…