Perennial season of banners, posters

Dear reader, today I will be relatively brief, for I have but a simple, single gripe. 

When the Preacher wrote in Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 that ‘There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens…’, it is quite safe to assume that he did not have in mind the walls, electricity poles and just about every conceivable public space in Ghana’s towns and cities when it comes to banners and posters. 

Ubiquitous spectacle

Out here, it appears one cannot turn, particularly in our urban centres,  without seeing posters and banners announcing funerals, church events, vacation classes and political ambitions, among many others plastered or hanging all over the place.\

In my beloved Kumasi, the epicentre of Ghana’s funeral industry, we have taken things a notch higher.

The trend is to announce funerals on giant billboards at strategic places in the city.

In almost every case, long after these banners, posters and billboards have become defunct by way of the event having taken place, they still blight the landscape, battered by the elements such that they lose whatever allure they may have been said to have in the first place when they appeared.

Of course, after the event, the owners have no incentive or motivation to remove them.

They simply move on.

As with bold signs saying ‘Do not urinate here’, ‘No hawking’, or ‘Do not walk on the grass’, among other edicts, the ‘Post no bills’ that is written on many public walls in this country is usually defiantly and brazenly ignored, and in many cases, the posters are actually used to smother the admonition into oblivion.

Otherwise they are simply slapped on older posters that no longer have relevance.

The war for space can be quite an aggressive one.

Yet, somehow, nobody seems much bothered to do anything about it. 

The law

Perhaps the irony of it all is that actually, there are bye-laws in our books that ban illegal posting of posters and banners, and which are the responsibility of local assemblies to enforce.

But then, like many of our elegantly crafted laws, they lack the teeth to bite and continue to gather fine dust in the archives, conveniently ignored.

To be fair, there have been instances when the assemblies have sat up and gone to town on this menace.

For instance, in March 2019, citinewsroom.com reported that Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) within the Greater Accra Region had banned the posting of banners and posters on ceremonial streets and key locations in the region with immediate effect.

According to the media house, a 14-day ultimatum had been issued to churches, advertisers, filmmakers, educational institutions and the general public to remove all such publicity materials from the city.

This edict, encouraging as it sounded, turned out to be the proverbial nine-day wonder, or what my friend, the author Nana Awere Damoah, likes to call ‘the vim of boiling beans’.

 Four years down the line, the menace continues unabated, not just in the region.

I think our politicians and churches should set much better examples of obeying the law.

Cash cow

In this day and age, with the plethora of media platforms, including social media, I wonder why we seem to be having more, rather than less, banners and posters all over our towns and cities.

Beautification of our physical landscapes should go beyond shiny new buildings, wide avenues and dizzying lights.

I do not know what stops our local assemblies from growing some muscle and surcharging the owners of these unsightly adornments for their removal and cleaning.

Aside from helping to keep our environment clean, it would also be a useful platform for earning money to supplement its budget.

Of course, you will also need an efficient court system to make these fines effective, with clear consequences in default.

In many countries, public indiscipline, such as wrongful parking or other traffic offences, rake in huge amounts of money by way of fines.  

For instance, in 2021 alone local councils around the UK made more than £255 million from parking penalties.

It is hardly rocket science to monetise indiscipline.

Indeed, it is a low-hanging fruit, because there will always be defaulters.

In our poorly-disciplined society, you cannot throw your hands in the air and wail that you have no money when there is money all around you waiting to be taken with relative ease.

Our local assemblies must find a way to bring out their dusty statute books and give the law some teeth.

 It cannot continue to be an open, all-year round season for posters and banners.

Rodney Nkrumah-Boateng,
Head, Communications & Public Affairs Unit,
Ministry of Energy,
Accra.
E-mail: rodboat@yahoo.com