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?