I must have missed the memo: yesterday was national sanitation day and all citizens were supposed to help in locally organised communal labour to help clear the massive sanitation problem we have in this country.

The president himself made the announcement, and is reported to have participated in the activities himself in the Volta region. Aside November 1, every first Saturday of every month is to continue this pattern of being a day for communal clean-ups in the country.

I am not against the idea in principle; communal participation is one of the biggest ways to get a town clean and to maintain that sanitation problem- however the problem here is that as usual we are jumping straight to the middle of the problem, without bothering to tackle the root cause of the issue.

This initiative, no matter how laudable, is just a stop gap to mask the bigger issue of a country totally without a sanitation plan and would fail massively without uprooting the bigger issue.

Why is the country and Accra in particular, so dirty? Is it that Ghanaians are just dirty people, or that the structures are not in place to deal with the issue? How much cleaning can be done on every fourth or fifth Saturday that can stem the tide of immense filth engulfing this nation?

You wouldn’t believe it but rubbish bins are an endangered species in Ghana. And even where they are present they are left to be overfilled and are barely emptied on time. Whenever you have business in the city and you are on foot and you buy, say, a sachet of water; finding a place to dispose of it after drinking is a herculean task. If you aren’t willing to keep hold of it until you get to a suitable place, well you can guess the rest.

There is a stipulation that every household should have their toilet facilities, but most households do not. Nobody bothers to enforce it, and this leads to the ‘free range’ method people are so used to.

There is a problem keeping liquid waste separate from solid waste, and people have become comfortable with living in filth, contributing negligently to it whilst not bothering with any personal initiatives to get it fixed.

These are all contributory factors, institutional and behavioural, and each deserves deeper scrutiny and attention, and only by tackling them can the sanitation problem be nipped in the bud.

Leaving all those and declaring national sanitation day is serious under kill, and we would have a million sanitation days without any improvement if the filth gets produced constantly.

I stay in Labadi, which is one of the hotspots of poor sanitation in the capital. You would thus think the sanitation day would be a big deal here, but I honestly did not even know of the initiative until this morning. I went on a lot of my usual rounds today, and I did not see the fruits of whatever labour was undertaken yesterday.

You cut out cancerous cells from the roots; all half-hearted attempts do is mask the bigger problem and lead to bigger issues down the line.