Providing waste management services is considered as doing or providing a public good because it is capital-intensive and hardly yields any monetary profit.
The profit is clean surroundings and good health.
People, no matter their geographical area, generate waste in all they do, and the waste must necessarily be managed well, else it swallows everybody up in no time and results in disease outbreaks.
Already, many of the diseases that are reported at our health facilities are sanitation-related. The reason we must not toy with ensuring the observance of good sanitation practices every time.
Unfortunately, many of our environmental services providers are either struggling to stay in business or have already folded up because they cannot keep up with the high cost of providing services to clients.
This has resulted in the piling up of rubbish at residences, markets, offices and everywhere waste is generated.
Even making matters worse are our poor access roads, which cause the expensive compactor trucks to break down frequently, coupled with the high cost of fuelling the garbage trucks.
Due to this, many households have resorted to the services of tricycles, popularly referred to as ‘aboboya’, to cart their waste to dump sites.
These tricycles are few, have a smaller capacity and are also unreliable, and so their impact is not felt as is envisaged.
When the erstwhile Akufo-Addo government established a Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources in 2017 to improve living standards by ensuring access to safe water and sanitation, as well as promote the sustainable management of water resources and come up with programmes to improve sanitation in the country, it was believed it was a step in the right direction.
Although the impact was lower than expected, scrapping that ministry meant that there was once again going to be little focus on sanitation management.
Currently, therefore, the woes of the sanitation sector have deepened, with the concomitant increase in the volumes of waste and litter on our streets.
The troubling state of affairs gives credence to the call by the Parliamentary Select Committee on Sanitation and Water Resources for dedicated funding to address the country's ongoing sanitation challenges.
According to the Chairman of the committee, John Kwabena Oti Bless, who made the call during a recent tour of waste treatment facilities in Tamale, such a fund will also ensure reliable payments to private sector service providers.
We are all for a permanent funding mechanism if one of its aims would be to ensure service providers who are mostly in the private sector are paid promptly for services rendered and on time to keep our environment clean, repair broken down equipment and pay staff promptly.
The Daily Graphic believes that one of the challenges plaguing the waste management sector currently is the huge amount owed to them by the government, such that they are forced to operate abysmally, which has, in turn, compelled many clients to unsubscribe from their services and leave them poorer.
Waste generation is a daily phenomenon which requires a sustainable funding mechanism, and the earlier we establish one, the better.
Furthermore, we join the select committee in urging the government to provide incentives for Ghanaian businesses that invest in impactful environmental projects and sanitation services, as experience has shown that, with the current population size, the government alone cannot handle the challenges.
We also pray that the government heed the call by the Environmental Services Providers Association to make the expensive equipment they import to aid in their work, such as compactor trucks, exempt from taxes.
The worst deal should be very low taxes, so they are able to import more equipment because we do not manufacture it.
While we call for a dedicated fund, we are of the view that the citizenry also needs to embrace an attitudinal change, stop indiscriminate littering and dumping, and instead use waste bins that are provided wherever we find ourselves.
