Features
Can the sanitation success story of KMA be sustained?
The mission statement of the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA) is aimed at “keeping the city clean and healthy by the provision and delivery of effective and efficient waste collection services and programmes, and environmentally accepted disposal.”
Among others, KMA is supposed to provide conveniently situated refuse disposal points, all in the name of proper sanitation without which the health of its population is at risk.
It is in view of these that when MrOsei- Assibey- Antwi, assumed office as the Chief Executive of the KMA, in March 2017,all eyes were on him to create an enabling environment for development and healthy living.
In fact, he took office at the time Kumasi metropolis had been engulfed in filth. There were mountains of refuse at vintage points in the metropolis much to the dismay of residents who were expecting a lot from his leadership to help ensure proper sanitation of the metropolis and its environs.
Some residents had, even taken the law onto themselves to do their own thing at the expense of the beauty of the once touted “Garden City of West Africa”.
Bringing sanity to the Kumasi metropolis, would demand leadership with strong and bold decisions coupled with measures and action plans devoid of politics.
It is quite interesting to note that, the dynamism employed by the Chief Executive saw Kumasi, the second largest city in Ghana, named among the top 15 cleanest cities in Africa in 2020, according to a ranking which considers cities which prioritise cleanliness and solid waste collection.
Kumasi occupied the 12th position after Accra the national capital placed third on the list topped by Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.
The list contained the following cities : Kigali-Rwanda, Windhoek-Namibia, Accra Ghana, Gaborone – Botswana, Dar-es- Salaam-Tanzania, Johannesburg-South Africa, Port Louis Mauritius, Tunis-Tunisia, Cape Town-South Africa, Nairobi-Kenya, Libreville-Gabon, Kumasi -Ghana, Algiers-Algeria, Asmara-Eritrea, Ouagadougou -Burkina Faso, in that order.The feat was as a result of a sustained sanitation strategies by KMA.
Over the years the KMA had followed some sustainable strategies and a series of activities in the area of solid waste collection including the provision of the door-to-door and communal waste collection services.
Defending the ranking, MrAssibey-Antwi said the KMA took steps to regularise the operations of tricycles (Aboboyaa) to further improve solid waste collection within the metropolis by identifying these service providers through colours and registering them with serial numbers to ensure the effective use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) at all times and to ensure that all tricycles filled with waste were covered with nets to avoid spillage.
His leadership style has brought improvement also in the private sector participation by regularising the solid waste collection contracts and procuring solid waste containers to be placed at the communal collection sites to maintain its position on the continent.
A number of communal collection sites were improved through the provision of skip pads with roofing under the partnership with private waste companies in the provision of trucks and bins to enable the Assembly carry out its house-to-house refuse collection.
In line with the President’s vision of making Ghana clean and the Assembly’s own mandate of providing a conducive environment for the inhabitants and businesses, the Assibey-Antwi led administration launched the, “Keep Kumasi Clean and Green Project”, with the aim of restoring Kumasi to its past glory of “Garden City”.
The project saw the planting of hundreds of seedlings of different species at various locations and the installation of hundreds of bins at vantage points within the Central Business District.
To power the project, the Assembly received DAF refuse compaction truck, 40ft ford compaction truck, two Pick-ups, 10 tricycles and five tricycles donated by VIP Bus Company Limited and Zoomlion Ghana Limited to support the street sweeping and drain cleaning .
Recognising that effective waste management does not only entail storage, collection and transportation of waste but also providing the appropriate place for proper disposal or reuse of the waste materials, KMA under the leadership of MrAssibey- Antwi, single handedly managed the Landfill when the Contractor, J. Stanley Owusu Limited vacated the site due to non-payment by devising a means of ensuring that things were properly managed within limited resources by procuring a landfill dozer and communal containers under the Ghana Urban Management Pilot Project.
It was as a result of the measures effectively put in place that the KMA was, in 2019, adjudged the best Liquid Waste Management Strategy in Ghana, in a Sanitation Challenge or competition organised by the Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources, with support from foreign partners which about 139 other Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) across the country participated.
The remarkable feat came with an award of 400,000.00 Pounds Sterling in a competition which was geared towards bringing transformational change to the city.
With financial support from the Sanitation Challenge for Ghana, the KMA implemented a number of projects and programmes to improve liquid waste management in the metropolis.
These include improving Water,Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) in four public schools in the construction of four 10-seater gender sensitive, disability friendly institutional water closet toilets with mechanised borehole and overhead tanks for four schools namely, Amankwatia, Anyaano, Bantama State Boys and St. Cyprians M/A Cluster of Schools.
The project strengthened the enforcement of sanitation bye-laws and provision of logistical support, procurement and distribution of 15 motorbikes to all the Sub-Metro Environmental Health and Sanitation Units to facilitate their movements to the communities.
Under this package, the Assembly improved the Liquid Waste Stabilisation Pond at the Oti Landfill Site through the desilting of ponds and storm drains, construction of concrete platform and headworks for direct discharge, installation of coupling hoses and gravelling of kilometre haul area to the site.
Additionally, the Assembly constructed a one kilometre fence wall around the AsafoCentralised Sewer System to halt encroachment by slum dwellers and auto-mechanics.
There is no doubt that waste management that remained the greatest headache of the Assembly, has now been reduced to the barest minimum and the rate at which the citizenry flouted environmental-sanitation bye-laws, has also gone down.
A close view of the sanitation success story of the Assibey- Antwi led KMA can be underlined by the organisation of periodic health education programmes in churches, schools, lorry terminals, mosques, radio stations and routine house-to-house inspections through the Environmental Health and Sanitation Unit of the Assembly.
It is, therefore, very important for the sustainability of the sanitation success story as Kumasi desreves to be clean and healthy. Whoever takes over should bear in mind the improvement of sanitation in the metropolis.
For cleanliness, they say, is next to Godliness; and Kumasi deserves the best.
By Kingsley E. Hope.
Features
Tears of Ghanaman, home and abroad
The typical native of Sikaman is by nature a hospitable creature, a social animal with a big heart, a soul full of the milk of earthly goodness, and a spirit too loving for its own comfort.
Ghanaman hosts a foreign pal and he spends a fortune to make him very happy and comfortable-good food, clean booze, excellent accommodation and a woman for the night.
Sometimes the pal leaves without saying a “thank you but Ghanaman is not offended. He’d host another idiot even more splendidly. His nature is warm, his spirit benevolent. That is the typical Ghanaian and no wonder that many African-Americans say, “If you haven’t visited Ghana. Then you’ve not come to Africa.
You can even enter the country without a passport and a visa and you’ll be welcomed with a pot of palm wine.
If Ghanaman wants to go abroad, especially to an European country or the United States, it is often after an ordeal.
He has to doze in a queue at dawn at the embassy for days and if he is lucky to get through to being interviewed, he is confronted by someone who claims he or she has the power of discerning truth from lie.
In short Ghanaman must undergo a lie-detector test and has to answer questions that are either nonsensical or have no relevance to the trip at hand. When Joseph Kwame Korkorti wanted a visa to an European country, the attache studied Korkorti’s nose for a while and pronounced judgment.
“The way I see you, you won’t return to Ghana if I allow you to go. Korkorti nearly dislocated her jaw; Kwasiasem akwaakwa. In any case what had Korkorti’s nose got to do with the trip?
If Ghanaman, after several attempts, manages to get the visa and lands in the whiteman’s land, he is seen as another monkey uptown, a new arrival of a degenerate ape coming to invade civilized society. He is sneered at, mocked at and avoided like a plague. Some landlords abroad will not hire their rooms to blacks because they feel their presence in itself is bad business.
When a Sikaman publisher landed overseas and was riding in a public bus, an urchin who had the impudence and notoriety of a dead cockroach told his colleagues he was sure the black man had a tail which he was hiding in his pair of trousers. He didn’t end there. He said he was in fact going to pull out the tail for everyone to see.
True to his word he went and put his hand into the backside of the bewildered publisher, intent on grabbing his imaginary tail and pulling it out. It took a lot of patience on the part of the publisher to avert murder. He practically pinned the white miscreant on the floor by the neck and only let go when others intervene. Next time too…
The way we treat our foreign guests in comparison with the way they treat us is polar contrasting-two disparate extremes, one totally incomparable to the other. They hound us for immigration papers, deport us for overstaying and skinheads either target homes to perpetrate mayhem or attack black immigrants to gratify their racial madness
When these same people come here we accept them even more hospitably than our own kin. They enter without visas, overstay, impregnate our women and run away.
About half of foreigners in this country do not have valid resident permits and was not a bother until recently when fire was put under the buttocks of the Immigration Service
In fact, until recently I never knew Sikaman had an Immigration Service. The problem is that although their staff look resplendent in their green outfit, you never really see them anywhere. You’d think they are hidden from the public eye.
The first time I saw a group of them walking somewhere, I nearly mistook them for some sixth-form going to the library. Their ladies are pretty though.
So after all, Sikaman has an Immigration Service which I hear is now alert 24 hours a day tracking down illegal aliens and making sure they bound the exit via Kotoka International. A pat on their shoulder.
I am glad the Interior Ministry has also realised that the country has been too slack about who goes out or comes into Sikaman.
Now the Ministry has warned foreigners not to take the country’s commitment to its obligations under the various conditions as a sign of weakness or a source for the abuse of her hospitality.
“Ghana will not tolerate any such abuse,” Nii Okaija Adamafio, the Interior Minister said, baring his teeth and twitching his little moustache. He was inaugurating the Ghana Refugee and Immigration Service Boards.
He said some foreigners come in as tourists, investors, consultants, skilled workers or refugees. Others come as ‘charlatans, adventurers or plain criminals. “
Yes, there are many criminals among them. Our courts have tried a good number of them for fraud and misconduct.
It is time we welcome only those who would come and invest or tour and go back peacefully and not those whose criminal intentions are well-hidden but get exposed in due course of time.
This article was first published on Saturday March 14, 1998
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Features
Decisions have consequences
In this world, it is always important to recognise that every action or decision taken, has consequences.
It can result in something good or bad, depending on the quality of the decision, that is, the factors that were taken into account in the decision making.
The problem with a bad decision is that, in some instances, there is no opportunity to correct the result even though you have regretted the decision, which resulted in the unpleasant outcome.
This is what a friend of mine refers to as having regretted an unregretable regret. After church last Sunday, I was watching a programme on TV and a young lady was sharing with the host, how a bad decision she took, had affected her life immensely and adversely.
She narrated how she met a Caucasian and she got married to him. The white man arranged for her to join him after the marriage and processes were initiated for her to join her husband in UK. It took a while for the requisite documentation to be procured and during this period, she took a decision that has haunted her till date.
According to her narration, she met a man, a Ghanaian, who she started dating, even though she was a married woman.
After a while her documents were ready and so she left to join her husband abroad without breaking off the unholy relationship with the man from Ghana.
After she got to UK, this man from Ghana, kept pressuring her to leave the white man and return to him in Ghana. The white man at some point became a bit suspicious and asked about who she has been talking on the phone with for long spells, and she lied to him that it was her cousin.
Then comes the shocker. After the man from Ghana had sweet talked her continuously for a while, she decided to leave her husband and return to Ghana after only three weeks abroad.
She said, she asked the guy to swear to her that he would take care of both her and her mother and the guy swore to take good care of her and her mother as well as rent a 3-bedroom flat for her. She then took the decision to leave her husband and return to Ghana.
She told her mum that she was returning to Ghana to marry the guy in Ghana. According to her, her mother vigorously disagreed with her decision and wept.
She further added that her mum told her brother and they told her that they were going to tell her husband about her intentions.
According to her, she threatened that if they called her husband to inform him, then she would commit suicide, an idea given to her by the boyfriend in Ghana.
Her mum and brother afraid of what she might do, agreed not to tell her husband. She then told her husband that she was returning to Ghana to attend her Grandmother’s funeral.
The husband could not understand why she wanted to go back to Ghana after only three weeks stay so she had to lie that in their tradition, grandchildren are required to be present when the grandmother dies and is to be buried.
She returned to Ghana; the flat turns into a chamber and hall accommodation, the promise to take care of her mother does not materialise and generally she ends up furnishing the accommodation herself. All the promises given her by her boyfriend, turned out to be just mere words.
A phone the husband gave her, she left behind in UK out of guilty conscience knowing she was never coming back to UK.
Through that phone and social media, the husband found out about his boyfriend and that was the end of her marriage.
Meanwhile, things have gone awry here in Ghana and she had regretted and at a point in her narration, was trying desperately to hold back tears. Decisions indeed have consequences.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT’
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