By; Harry Hammond
0244658466 / 0207698171
For years, I have watched with growing concern as the sanitation crisis in our capital, Accra, deepens. The gutters choked with plastic, the heaps of refuse at Agbogbloshie, Kaneshie, Kwame Nkrumah Circle and our beaches, they tell a story of a beautiful city slowly being buried under its own waste.
We have tried many things. The monthly National Sanitation Day. The evacuation levies. The engagement of private waste collectors. The ‘Operation Clean Your Frontage’ campaign. The results have been mixed at best, disappointing at worst. Yet we keep doing the same things, deploying the same strategies, and somehow expecting a different result. As the old saying goes, that is the definition of insanity.
We cannot continue on this path. I believe we have just been handed a golden opportunity, perhaps the closest we have ever come to a sustainable solution, and we are not paying attention. I refer to the Community Service Bill recently signed by the President. For many, this bill is seen narrowly as a penal reform,an alternative to custodial sentences for minor offenders. That is true, but it is much more than that. If we choose to see it differently, it is a national human resource waiting to be harnessed for development. It is free, organized labour that can be deployed for public good, emerging from the misfortune of others who have fallen foul of the law.
We have quietly told ourselves that we have lost the fight against filth. We whisper it to ourselves when we hold our noses to walk past a drain. We have normalized it. Once in a while, when cholera breaks out or the rains flood the city because the drains are blocked, we pretend to be concerned. We organize press conferences, we issue threats, we clean for a week, and then we return to business as usual. It has become, frankly, hogwash.
But what if we did it differently this time?
A small voice, perhaps a voice of conscience and common sense, keeps telling me: If this community service scheme is well managed, well structured, and provided with the right logistics and tools, we will be on the verge of eradicating the sanitation problem in Accra permanently. This problem can be consigned to the history books.
Imagine this model: Under the supervision of the Department of Social Welfare, the Judicial Service, and the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs), persons sentenced to community service are formed into well-kitted, trained, and supervised Sanitation Brigades. They are not left to wander. They are provided with gloves, boots, wheelbarrows, shovels, tricycles, and compactors. They are assigned to specific electoral areas, working from 6am to 2pm, to desilt gutters, clear refuse heaps, clean markets, scrub pavements, and maintain public spaces. They are identifiable, accountable, and their service is tracked.
This is not forced labour; it is lawful, corrective service sanctioned by the courts and recognized worldwide as best practice. It restores dignity to the offender by allowing them to pay back society, and it restores cleanliness to society.
Yes, initially, this will be capital intensive. You cannot send people to clean without tools. You need personal protective equipment, you need trucks, you need coordination centres, you need supervisors, you need health screening. The state alone cannot bear this cost, especially given our current fiscal constraints.
This is where stakeholder commitment must come in. This must be seen as a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) project of national importance.
The banks, who benefit from a clean and healthy economy; the oil companies and mining companies, whose operations impact the environment; the telcos, who have branded every corner of this city; the multimedia houses, who shape public perception; and the multinational corporations who call Accra home, all must come together to fund and support this. They can adopt a district. A bank can provide 50 sets of PPE and two trucks for Ablekuma Central. A telco can fund the logistics for AyawasoWest. A mining company can sponsor the recycling and composting component. The media can provide the publicity and the social re-engineering needed to make citizens appreciate the work being done. It is a game changer because it solves three problems at once.
First, it solves the sanitation problem with a constant, reliable workforce.
Second, it solves the prison overcrowding problem. Our prisons were not built to hold people who failed to pay a traffic fine or who committed a minor nuisance offence.
Third, it solves the problem of citizen attitude. When people see offenders cleaning gutters as punishment, it becomes a powerful deterrent against indiscriminate littering. It carries a moral lesson that no amount of preaching has achieved.
Accra wants to be a modern capital. It cannot be modern with filth. We host the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat. We welcome investors and tourists daily. What impression does filth give?
The Community Service Bill should not be allowed to become just another law on paper. The Ministry of Local Government, Decentralisation and Rural Development, the Ministry of Interior, the Attorney-General’s Department, and the Office of the Head of Local Government Service must sit together now and develop a comprehensive implementation framework with sanitation at its core.
This is the time to make use of free labour for public good. This is the time to turn our misfortune into a fortune for the city.
We have lost too many battles against filth quietly. Let us win this war openly, together.
