The Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) has reportedly hired workers to go round the newly-inaugurated Kwame Nkrumah Circle Interchange to pick up empty water sachets and other waste materials that have littered the place.
The idea is to ensure that the new interchange is kept clean. The Ghana Private Road Transport Union (GPRTU) has also supported the idea of keeping the place clean, and has gone a step further to ban the sale of sachet water in the new bus terminal around the Interchange.
Some of the sachet water vendors protested in an interview they granted some of the television stations that they were being pushed out of business, and that the decision not to allow them to sell at the terminal should be reversed.
The GPRTU has, however, turned down the request. It is instructive to note that this is not the first time hawkers have been banned from a lorry terminal in Accra.
Indeed, the new Achimota Lorry Terminal has also banned hawkers from selling inside the station to avoid littering the place. The decision, which met initial resistance from the hawkers, has today helped to keep the place very neat.
The Chronicle, therefore, supports the action by the GPRTU at circle to also ban hawkers from using the new lorry park. It is equally a good decision by the AMA to deploy permanent staff to go round the interchange, to ensure that the place in not littered with all kinds of waste materials.
But, much as we agree to these decisions by both the AMA and the GPRTU, we shudder to say that this is not the final solution to the littering of our streets in the country.
It is common in Ghana to see passengers throwing away yogurt and water sachets, among others, from moving vehicles and cars. Any patriotic son of the land who dares rebuking these erring passengers is subjected to verbal abuse.
As we have noted in this column several times, all these are happening because we fail to educate the Ghanaian, right from the kindergarten up to the university level, as to why he or she must not litter the streets or the environment.
Hong Kong is today one of the cleanest countries in the world, because education about sanitation is impacted to the child immediately he or she starts going to school. As a result, the child grows with the idea, and would see it as a crime to litter the streets.
Ghana could have adopted the same idea by making sanitation a part of our school curricula, where every school-going child will be indoctrinated to see sanitation as being next to Godliness, and that throwing papers among others on our streets and public places is a crime.
The country may not see the benefit of this in the short term, but in the long term, Ghanaians would benefit tremendously from this decision, as the children would grow with what they have been taught in school.
Regrettably, leaders of this country have not tuned their minds to that, and rather continue to implement short term measures to address our sanitation problems, which are not yielding the desired results.
Employing people to go round picking waste materials from the Nkrumah Interchange would make the place look nice, but how long is the AMA going to sustain this? Also, stopping the hawkers from plying their trade at our lorry terminals may sound good on paper, but can same be done on our streets and other public places?
The elephant is in the room, but we are all skating around it, as if we have seen nothing. The problem of sanitation must be tackled from the grassroots, and that is the education of the Ghanaian child before he grows up to become an adult. Until that is done, the ad hoc measures we have put in place would come to nothing.
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