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The announcement landed with the usual blast of trumpets. A National Sanitation Day. The Ghana Armed Forces deployed to crack the problem. Citizens called to action. Nobody quite seems to know what that action is.
Let us call it what it is – yet another grand policy pronouncement that lands with a media splash, generates noise for a week, and will slowly dissolve into the dusty air of our urban roads.
Yes, we understand; it’s supposed to be a great visual image of Ghana getting to work, but seriously? Ghanaians have seen this movie before.
When the flooding season hits and gutters overflow, when images of submerged homes fill our screens, the pressure on government becomes intense. We have to be seen to be doing something; or, rather, something must be done. A National Sanitation Day is the policy equivalent of a press release: it signals activity without demanding structural change.
This kind of intervention is the base standard for knee-jerk governance, and the typical response to the politics but not the problem. A few months ago, nobody was talking about this. Now it is a national directive. That is not strategy. That is reaction.
Someone must enlighten me: what does a Friday/Saturday (not really sure) clean-up have to do with flooding? Obviously not a lot. Flooding in Accra, Kumasi and other big towns and cities is not a problem of there not being enough one-day clean-up campaigns. It is a problem of unplanned urbanisation, with buildings rising in waterways; wetlands used for development; gutters designed for a population one-third the current size; 30% of waste actually being collected, leaving the rest to end up in gutters and drains; and a complete lack of enforcement – building permits ignored, buffer zones encroached on.
By the way, does anybody actually know what the National Clean-Up requires of them? Is it sweeping in front of your house? Is it a community sanitation exercise? Is it mandatory? Will there be sanctions?
Who coordinates? What happens to the waste collected? Say hello to ambiguity, low compliance, confusion and eventual abandonment.
A Friday/Saturday (not really sure) morning sweep with soldiers and brooms does nothing about the Odaw River, narrowed by illegal structures. It does nothing about the Korle Lagoon, choked with silt and plastic. When the next heavy rain comes, the waters will rise again, whether or not we do a photo shoot of ministers and MCEs sweeping the road.
If flooding were a problem of dust and rubbish, we would have solved it years ago. Especially the way Ghanaians love to sweep. We can sweep grass till it turns to dust and paths till they become valleys. That is not the problem. Ours is one of planning, enforcement and investment. A National Clean-Up does none of these things.
And while we are on the subject, tell me why anybody thinks that this is the best use of the Ghana Armed Forces. Personally I find this one of the most troubling things about the whole “campaign”. The Ghana Armed Forces are the guarantee and protector of our sovereignty, our only responder to extreme emergencies. And here we are, deploying them for roadside sweeping. Obviously and seriously “Defending the Country by Land, Air and Sea”.
This is not about whether soldiers can sweep. Of course, they can sweep. It is about what the event says. Are we saying that our civil institutions, such as the metropolitan assemblies, waste management companies, Environmental Health Authority, are either unwilling or unable to do their job?
Are we saying that we prefer the idea of the drama of military involvement over the simple work of getting our institutions to function; that we are happy to distract our armed forces from their core training, readiness and national security responsibilities? Let’s not forget these are men and women who are trained to kill or be killed for Ghana. Is this really the highest value we place on them: to turn them into road sweepers to fulfil a political intervention? Can you imagine SEAL Team 6 or the SAS carrying brooms to sweep the streets of Washington, DC or London? Or are we accepting that, as a nation, and after decades of civil and public service rot/decay, we are left with no other course of action to get basic jobs done?
If Ghana was a car, it would be running on fumes and the battery cells would be almost dry. If the only thing our government can do when there is a mini-crisis is reach for tired, overused, symbolic gestures, then we are in trouble. The greatest challenge for the government is to suspend the photo op and get down to business. Provide thorough, sustainable, unpopular solutions that work.
Government isn’t a fashion shoot, nor is it a red-carpet event; it’s unglamorous. There is nothing sexy about reliable waste collection contracts, properly funded metropolitan assemblies, zoning enforcement, drainage master plans with timelines and budgets, but that is what is required.
Ghanaian governments unfortunately have a recurring pattern of behaviour: announce, mobilise, photograph, declare success, move on. That is governance by adrenaline, not by administration.
For a country so full of itself when it comes to claims of intellect, why is nobody asking a few simple questions? Does a National Sanitation Day answer even basic questions? Like: is our country cleaner because of it? What’s the budget? Who is responsible for what? How will it be sustained beyond the day? Who will enforce observance? How do we measure success? And will it stop the floods?
How can it even be a policy if it can’t pass this first test? When national policy is decided quickly, with no clear goal other than “we need to be seen doing something”, this is what we get.
As I have already said, a clear national sanitation strategy would be boring and it would not make headlines. The only thing it would do is actually work: map Ghana’s critical drainage bottlenecks and fund correction, decentralise waste management. No more campaigns, just enforcement and fines, civic education at school level, a stop to approving development in flood-prone areas and a clear budget for annual action in the dry season to desilt drains.
It’s not rocket science; it’s just political will.
I can’t end without recalling that we have been here before. There was the National Sanitation Day launched in 2014 under the previous Mahama administration – first Saturday of every month – which fizzled out and died. We have had Operation Clean Your Frontage. We have had Accra Clean-Up exercises. We have had Keep Ghana Clean campaigns. Same floods. Same choked gutters. Same plastic waste. Same frustration.
They are all within living memory; they all failed. To do the same thing again, under a different name, with the military this time, and to expect a different outcome? Is that not the definition of insanity?
Ghana has the knowledge to solve its sanitation and flooding problems. We have engineers, planners and policy minds who have written the blueprints. What we lack is the political will to do the hard, slow, unglamorous work of building functional systems.
The idea of a National Sanitation Day is a symptom of our national disease of opting for symbolic gestures when what we need is a pragmatic governance solution.
In the meantime, let’s mark our National Clean-Up (Friday or Saturday, not really sure) as the military turns out bearing brooms, and take as many photographs as possible. Then let’s issue a statement and wait for the next heavy rainfall, so we can get right back to where we started.
