Vice President of IMANI Ghana, Kofi Bentil has said Ghana’s capital city, Accra, has been designed to be dirty.
He argued that contrary to the widely held perception that Ghanaians are dirty by nature, in his opinion, “Ghanaians are not dirty! This city is designed to be dirty and the people whom we’ve paid to work them don’t work them. Our city is designed to be dirty.”
His comments come on the back of the institution of a National Sanitation Day exercise which takes on place on the first Saturday of every month.
The National Sanitation Day exercise was instituted following a deadly outbreak of cholera in 2014 which claimed hundreds of lives and infected about 10,000 people.
Many are those who have kicked against the idea and have suggested that waste management companies must be resourced to daily clean up the various cities and failure to do so must attract strict sanctions.
Others have also called for legal backing for the exercise to force every Ghanaian to partake following the citizen apathy which has characterized the exercise since its inception in 2014.
Sharing his thoughts on the matter on Citi FM’s news analysis programme, The Big Issue, IMANI Ghana’s Vice President insisted that how the city of Accra has been designed is the sole cause of the filth which has engulfed it.
He said: “When you design open drains, when you don’t clear bushes, when you don’t provide dustbins, when you don’t provide places of convenience for people in transit, and when the main river running through the city is surrounded almost by design by markets and slums in which they push this rubbish…”
“…when you have a walking distance from the office of the Metropolitan Chief Executive, sludge being poured raw into the sea, when you have a treatment plant that has not worked and nobody cares, when you collect taxes, misuse, steal and waste on there is no consequence on the head, you have designed a failure!”
<<Print>>