Wa, Jan. 26, GNA - Mr. Henry Bagah, Environmental Health Officer for Wa Municipality in the Upper West Region, has called on the Municipal Assembly's Building Inspectorate unit to intensify its monitoring of all residential structures in the Municipality to ensure that every household has a toilet facility.

He said the lack of household toilet facilities had caused a lot of people residing in the Municipality to resort to open defecation which could pose serious environmental health problems in the future if not addressed. The Environmental Health Officer said this in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) at Wa on Monday, on the problem of open defecation in the Municipality .

He indicated that the Municipality lacked adequate public toilet facilities to help address some of its sanitation problems, adding that there were only 31 public toilet facilities in the area serving the sanitation needs of an estimated population of about 126,000. "The few toilets in the system are constantly abused by the public, thereby, forcing other users who cannot withstand the mess created inside them to resort to defecating around in open places", he noted. Mr. Bagah explained that the situation had been created by some landlords who collaborated with quack land surveyors to re-demarcate properly laid out plots meant for building public toilets into putting up houses.

According to him the influx of students at the University for Development Studies (UDS) and Wa Polytechnic in the Municipality had made many landlords to turn every small space left in their plots into living rooms for rental to students. Mr. Bagah said the Municipality could not develop into a modern one if it was still faced with poor sanitation problems, and urged all stakeholders to come together to ensure that the right thing was done to keep its environs clean. 26 Jan 10