Rains, bad roads render Kumasi landfill site inaccessible

As of last Saturday, there were truck loads of refuse and tricycles known as 'Borla taxis' built up on parts of the road, stretching out to about 200 metres, waiting for the water to recede for them to discharge their waste.

There has also been the accumulation of waste at various transfer sites in the city.

Last Saturday night, the Daily Graphic saw some youth of Asafo, a suburb of Kumasi, preventing some trucks from offloading at the overstretched Zion School transfer site near the Kumasi Office of the Graphic Communications Group Limited.

City authorities, who had been at their wits’ end, said theywere putting up strategies to contain the situation.

Located at Oti, a community popularly known as Kuwait, the landfill, which is the only final disposal site for the country’s second biggest city, sits on a 100-acre land.

It is owned by the KMA and managed by J. Stanley-Owusu Limited, a private waste management company.

But the company has virtually grounded its activities at the landfill, maintaining just a skeletal staff for about six months now, because, according to the Managing Director, Mr William Stanley-Owusu, the KMA owed it four years of contract payments.

He, however, stated that the Minister of Sanitation and Water Resources, Madam Cecilia Dapaah, had given a firm assurance to see to it that the company was paid the arrears to enable it to return to the site.

On October 9, this year, the KMA issued a statement informing residents of the “alarming damage” caused to the access road, which had an adverse effect on the collection of waste in the metropolis.

In the face of what the statement described as the “mountainous challenge”, the assembly said it was working hard to fix the road.
The access road is 2.8 kilometres.

When the Daily Graphic contacted to the Kumasi Metropolitan Chief Executive (MCE), Mr Osei Assibey Antwi, he described the development as a serious challenge.

He said the assembly initially engaged Contracta, the construction firm working on the Kejetia Market project, to examine the possibility of rehabilitating the road but after an assesment, it indicated that it was going to be capital intensive.

The MCE said he had submitted the report to the Regional Minister, who had invited the Regional Director of the Department of Feeder Roads to go to the aid of the assembly in fixing the challenge.