Need for new health order
The National Sanitation Day has been introduced. The press has reported various levels of success in different parts of the country.
As I drove round the streets of Abelenkpe in the Ayawaso East constituency in the Greater Accra Region, I noticed that the streets and gutters were clean and the awful smell of the gutters had lessened. But already, there were rubbish bins full of refuse broadcast in front of some houses.
Personally, I don’t like the strategy of the periodic clean-up campaigns and landfills. They encourage the accumulation of refuse and deny us the products of our refuse. Accumulated refuse is also serious health hazard, a social menace and economic waste. Deposits of accumulated refuse are breeding place for mosquitoes, flies and rodents which transmit diseases such as cholera, typhoid and malaria.
Periodic clean - ups
Apart from these periodic clean-ups not helping our disease-prevention effort, they have been tried in Accra since Independence and been short-lived and ineffective.
In 2015, I see no reason why we should not change our mindset and rather educate our people to realise that refuse disposal is a continuous daily chore. With political will and increased community involvement, every community of a reasonable population size (1,000,000) should be required to manage its own refuse. The things required are small engineered sanitary sites (SESS) and public health education in our neighbourhoods.
Methods of waste disposal
The methods of final sanitary refuse disposal are incineration, composting, recycling and biogas production. Depending on the volume and the composition of refuse, the necessary plants can be assembled at a suitable site in the neighbourhood. With these in place, communities can be educated and mobilised to store and sort out their refuse using different colours of trash bags which can be collected from homes by truck pushers and the tricycle riders (‘bola girls and boys’) and sold to the SESS. This would create jobs in the community. The SESS refuse will then be collected at a cheaper cost.
Education on sanitation
‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’. We should use our schools, churches, and civil society groups to educate our people. The education should go further than the provision of health information. It should aim at inculcating in the citizenry the responsibility of protecting one’s own health and avoidance of injury to that of others. At the community level, individual and local pride can easily be nurtured to make such strategy successful and cheaper and allow us to enjoy the products of our refuse. This includes energy for our houses, factories and industries and manure for our soils.
