Entropy Engulfs Ghanaian Cities

Published on 17th April 2006

Every city has a kind of genetic copy that looks like Bukom, a slum suburb in Accra. This shadow of self is the city’s own hypothetical disintegration, the awful promise of what will happen when the worst takes place. Civilization will vanish as Bukom breaks through the increasingly filthy Accra or Kumasi, unleashing awful sanitation through the structures. City council and leaders like the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu 11, and Vice President Aliu Mahama will be at war with dirty-minded city dwellers who go hauling filth around Accra or Kumasi.

The poor urban sanitation backs malaria, Ghanaian's chief killer. Most Ghanaian cities are characterized by mounting filth as a result of people urinating and defecating anywhere, crime, deepening debt, inadequate revenue and falling services.

The cities’ officials who are battling the worsening sanitation problems have been at war with the dirty-minded dwellers since Jerry Rawlings’ no-nonsense military juntas, and have survived with their filthy culture. Here African civilization stands still, and people who live as if health doesn’t matter go howling through the cities’ wastelands like a mindless primitive tribe.

Watching Accra or Kumasi, and thinking about the expanding degree of filthy people throwing garbage anywhere and everywhere makes some of the increasingly concerned Ghanaians feel that city dwellers have lost their sense of sanitation and civility. How can a people who initially lived a clean life create and live in such horrible filth? Such gross, offhand, disregard to health defies Ghanaian/African culture, with its moral principles some of which enthuse healthy living. 

Ghanaian urban dwellers have become immune to their despicable sanitation environment. This has created a future shock and an odd familiarity with filth: it has some feel of an Ashiaman – a Ghanaian throwback migrated to unimaginable slum, where life is shortened by filth.

Most Ghanaian urban dwellers go about their daily businesses as if they have no serious sanitation and health problems to deal with. The appalling sanitation makes the ruling National Patriotic Party (NPP)’s much-hyped tourism program look like a child’s play. A Norwegian visitor told me recently in Kumasi that “Ghanaians have to take care of their sanitation before they can talk much about tourism…The beaches are a disgrace with terrible smell from human faeces, urine and garbage.”

In Freudian terms, the sanitation bylaws are supposed to perform the function of the superego, policing the filthy id. The Nima slum principle goes to work when the id takes over from the superego and puts on garbage, when dreadful sanitation goes wild. Mega-Cities: Innovations for Urban Life, an NGO, says, “The high population density in Accra has resulted in congestion, overcrowding, substandard housing, inadequate education and health facilities, poor sanitation, and a generally degraded environment. In poor communities and cities like Accra, the worst problems tend to be associated with lack of adequate water, sanitation, and garbage services.

The 1991 Annual Report on health for Greater Accra Metropolitan Assembly emphasized the twin role of poor environmental conditions and the lack of health knowledge in causing hygiene-related diseases. Solid waste collection is a problem around the home where, according to a recent survey, at least 42% of people practice open storage. The 300,000 tons of solid waste collected per year in Accra alone represent only 60% of waste generated.”

A career of confronting dwellers who appear careless about the mounting filth around frays the nerves. It drives officials such as those at Accra Metropolitan Assembly responsible for sanitizing their surroundings not only crazy but also helpless in the face of ‘uncivilized,’ unco-operating and irresponsible citizens wanting to live in filth – citizens who do not abide by building codes and so their illegal structures not only block most waterways and drains but also have no toilets. Residents in Accra and its suburbs say more than half of the buildings in the city have no toilets. Put in an unhelpful situation, the filthy urban dwellers prefer their innocence and do not really want to know the mounting filth that is engulfing them and the length sanitation officials go when trying to enforce Ghanaian cities’ bylaws. In this sense, the terms “war on sanitation” and “war on filth” encourage and even demand an all out attack by sanitation officials upon anti-sanitation citizens. In most Ghanaian cities such as Accra and Kumasi, city officials and concerned citizens are fighting an unwinnable war, assuming that large social responsibilities belong more to politicians and the citizens’ civic virtues.

The sanitation troubles are a collective urban problem. An Accra or Kumasi resident’s sanitation judgment, ordinarily sound and self-aware, may defer to the collective judgment of the entire Accra or Kumasi population, where individual civic responsibility gets diffused.

This means it will take a strong, poised character to wade against the currents of citizens who are filthy-minded and mess up their surroundings. A secret of the transformation from filthy group to grimy mob: a few dirty citizens mess up the city, knotting the rope and throwing it over the limb of a tree. The other citizens allow themselves to be carried passively by the dirty group purpose and Accra or Kumasi or Cape Coast becomes engulfed in filth and becomes difficult to clean.


This article has been read 1,724 times
COMMENTS