13th March 2013
Article by Christiana Afua Nyarko
Edited by A.C. Ohene
Take a look at this scenario: a market woman buys chilled water and, after drinking it, throws the polythene that had contained the water on the floor of the already filthy market. A young man spots the scene and gently walks up to her; in a calm manner, he advises her not to repeat the action. But, this much older woman, full of anger; instantly hurls insults at him for having the audacity to scold an older person in public. She annoyingly exclaims: Aha na wo da?, which literally translates as: Is this your sleeping place?
Let us look at this scenario too: A woman, after using her chamber pot, empties its content of urine into the main drain along the street just in front of her home. A third case study is a self-contained house with no septic tank but a pipe connecting the household’s water closet directly into a nearby drain that eventually empties the human excreta into a close-by river. The river is the only source of drinking water for hundreds downstream. Other places, excreta and other poisonous effluent have been dumped in the sea, which rejects it back unto the coast.
The aforementioned pictures are the daily attitudes in our society. Despite the efforts by our leaders at the various metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies to help sanitize the environment; some undisciplined Ghanaians continue to litter our communities with reckless abandon. No wonder, last year, 2014, Ghana ranked as low as 135th – out of 193 countries – in the Environmental Performance Index; scoring only 17.77 percent.
The National Sanitation Day was instituted, last November, to help sanitize the environment but many Ghanaians have already started boycotting the monthly mass-cleaning. Thousands of shopkeepers and other self-employed people also flout the government instruction to close their businesses to participate in the communal work till noon.
Television Africa News believes that such unpatriotic and un-nationalistic attitudes are flourishing because the by-laws of the various assemblies have largely remained unenforced. Gone are the days when sanitary inspectors from the town councils – popularly called Tankass – thoroughly checked to ensure people kept their homes and surroundings tidy.
TV Africa News firmly believes that it is high time the Tankass figure and function were re-introduced to curb the fatal environmental pollution. After all, as the saying goes: se wosan wakyi kofa a, yenkyi. There is absolutely nothing wrong in re-enacting effective ways of life and rules of the Good Old Days.
