“Under the past year, headlines have talked of Ghana as the seventh dirtiest country in the world and then we are going backwards compared with other countries…

“We were confronted with the fact that one in five Ghanaians uses Ghana as a toilet—defecating daily in the bush, on the beach and in drains.

“The rest of the world is improving dramatically, [but] we seem to be standing still. Under the past 25 years in Ghana, improvement was so slow that if we maintain this rate, it will take Ghana 500 years to be free from open defecation” (David Duncan, UNICEF’s Country Director of Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene).

A SHAMEFUL IRONY BEING OVERLOOKED FOR THE SAKE OF POLITICAL CONVENIENCE AND EXPEDIENCY

The above-referenced quotation describes a country that will hold its sixtieth anniversary of independence on March 6, 2017.

In fact if Ghana had not been mentioned in the quotation, one would easily have settled on a model eleventh-century village or jungle civilization as the referent.

Why are we retrogressing rather than progressing in this age and time, this great age of scientific, technological and industrial advancement?

And yet we call ourselves a Lower or Middle Income Country!

And yet again we also unabashedly claim to be an independent people, a proud people who think their nominal freedom and independence are worthy of national celebration—a celebration that is expected to cost this wobbling nation in real terms, of the prohibitive quantum of money and lost time that could otherwise have been dedicated to national soul-searching, introspection, or reflection on our retrogression in the midst of material, technocratic, and intellectual abundance!

A shameful irony indeed!

What exactly should we expect in a country whose ruling-class members carry prosthetic heads of open-defecation brain matter? It is this unpatriotic, frigidly wicked open-defecation mentality of the ruling class that provides the inspiration for institutional corruption and moral decay in the Ghanaian body politic.

All told, the rambling ironies are many and varied: Children continue to study under trees, public services are a paralyzing eyesore, public health is in shambles and nothing to write home about, open defecation is a national tragedy, galamsey-related pollution and criminality eats away the national soul, unemployment is a cancerous national disgrace, filth and dirt and a poor sewerage system define the sad fate of a so-called Lower or Middle-Income nation-state called Ghana.

We have made strategic incompetence our lot. What then is the point in celebrating independence when a simple problem as eradicating or curtailing open defecation is an albatross on the nation’s neck? Perhaps it is because our stubborn ears have become so habituated to the appealing aroma of open defecation, universally bewitched by the latter’s evocative power of presence.

How else can we sufficiently explain the entrenched universality of the strange phenomenon of open defecation in the Ghanaian body politic? Open defecation is indeed a scar—a blot—on the national conscience in which case it forcefully competes with public infrastructure and heritage/historical sites, although many a Ghanaian does not seem to come to terms with the idea that open defecation depreciates public infrastructure and heritage/historical sites.

Open defecation also turns away potential tourists and general visitors to these sites and the country, negatively affecting revenue generation in the process. It is sad and unfortunate that we have thrown strategic policy prioritization to the dogs. We no longer even care for the proverbial wisdom that says “godliness is next to cleanliness.”

In fact, Charles Wereko-Brobby and Kwadwo Mpiani squandered the opportunity to reverse this negative trend occasioned by open defecation when Ghana turned fifty. These men threw away millions of dollars without so much as thinking about the innocent little child who studies under trees and the detrimental effects of open defecation on the longitudinal health of this child, through a scheme called “loot, create, and share.”

At least, part of this money wasted on a phantom independence celebration could have been used to put up cutting-edge laboratories to study or investigate the epidemiology of emerging diseases and combating the paralyzing challenges and conundrums posed by the policy question of disease burden.

Of course Akufo-Addo, who was an influential cabinet member of a government to which Were-Brobby and Mpiani also belonged, suddenly assumed a stature of moral and political reticence on a serious matter such as national disgrace borne out of corruptocracy, a palpable feature of the Kufuor government.

To put it mildly, Akufo-Addo conveniently became as morally and politically dead as a dodo in this matter of national disgrace. It is high time Akufo-Addo both got rid of his open-defecation mentality and did away with the stigmatic totalitarianism of open defecation once and for all. Akufo-Addo therefore cannot continue to hold himself up as a corruptocratic outlier in operating the machinery of political dynamics.

But there is so much Akufo-Addo and government can do in this case. Open defecation is a behavior, an attitude, a mindset. Government does not tell its citizens what to eat let alone how to manage their bowel movements. That approach will make for executive and bureaucratic overreach. All the foregoing reservations notwithstanding, here is what Duncan has to say:

“We are providing the facilities, building new toilets and all that in all communities, but at the end of the day, it is also going to depend on our own behavior and attitude, because there are places where you have the toilets, but the people are not using it…”

Ideally, it is not government’s responsibility to tell its citizens how, where and when to dispose of their bowel movements. More generally, though, it is as much a serious question of individual as government responsibility. This is no rocket science. This is largely because available resources earmarked or allocated for effective disease burden management are in short supply.

Of course, public health is a government’s responsibility yet the success or otherwise of public health requires the sustained input or contributions of citizens. This in turn requires citizens’ investing autodidactic efforts in personal hygiene

For instance, the outbreak of emerging diseases such as Ebola, and the challenging rise in disease burden that accompanied it, in addition to the economic havoc it wrecked on some West African countries and productivity, taught us that indeed, as they say, “prevention is better than cure.”

Among other things emerging diseases create an unnecessary climate of fear in a population, and when it also incidentally underwrites population decimation in certain situations as Ebola did in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, then it is incumbent upon us to change our ossified attitude and behavior toward waste disposal. The recent cholera outbreak in Ghana also taught us many things.

Finally, it is out submission that Akufo-Addo’s Water and Sanitation Ministry be tasked organize and run this year’s independence celebrations. These independence celebrations should be about putting up toilets across the nation, rather than indulging in frivolous binge drinking and noise pollution under the shameful banner of Ghana’s sixtieth anniversary of independence. A people caught in the vicious circle of open defecation are far removed from the political realism of independence.

SOME CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES: THE ELEMENT OF INTERNAL COLONIALISM

Any nation whose citizens and government expect foreigners to build toilet facilities for it through philanthropic largesse is not truly independent, let alone be worthy of extravagant independence celebrations, such as those we are expecting on March 6, 2017 under the new administration.

The other major irony is that the phantom independence we claim to have and to enjoy does not, if we can actually say so, so much as guarantee absolute control of our vast wealth by the ruling political and economic classes.

In other words we don’t even control our own economy. Who are the real players in control of our gold and diamond? Our oil and gas? Our conscience? Therefore if we may ask again and again, what have we achieved as a people to merit these expensive celebrations of our independence anniversary when, for all intents and purposes, it does not exist as a matter of course?

Independence, truly a figment of our imagination! For how long can we allow these marauding thieves called politicians to hold the nation to ransom? What have these shameless post-1966 leaders done for the country with their international leaking begging-bowls apart from doing a very good job of representing their colonial master on the local scene? These post-1966 leaders who have managed to build a strong machinery of internal colonialism since the phantom departure of their colonial master?

Since the philosophical and ideological antecedence of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) strongly pointed to a virulent, uncompromising anti-independence streak, it is only a matter of time that the leadership of the NPP, the current government, will do right by the people and the nation by re-assuming this anti-independence stance and by seeing practical wisdom in investing independence celebrations money and other resources earmarked for these celebrations in prudent policy strategies, such as building toilets across the entire nation, educating and training sanitation officials and the general public about the dangers of open defecation, building waste management recycling facilities, and generally, what all these undertakings particularly mean for the health of the national economy, GDP, disease burden, national productivity, and public health.

After all the only true, genuine independence we ever enjoyed was the one Kwame Nkrumah won for us which, unfortunately, the post-1966 leadership of the country did everything in their power to thwart, dilute, poison, trample upon, and re-sell to external corporate interests on the cheap!

Preventing the post-1966 leadership of the country from re-enslaving Ghanaians and then forcing them back to the colonial era should be the goal of many a patriotic citizen. We therefore need to invest money and resources exclusively meant for independence celebrations in our people and ideas that will get us out of our arrested development, ignorance, and mass poverty. We need a sustainable economic and political development for that matter.

Finally, we believe true, genuine independence will naturally come to us on a silver platter only if we discover an effective means to manage our feces, our stinking shit. As a matter of fact no group of people deserves genuine political independence if it cannot so much as take care of a simple matter as managing its feces.

What is more, granted that UNICEF’s unencouraging yet possible frank assessment that Ghana is moving at a snail’s pace when it comes to fighting the entrenched presence of open defecation, the same UNICEF is also saying it will take Ghanaians the next 500 years to break the yoke of open defecation. This means Ghanaians will not be truly independent from open-defecation peonage for the next 500 years.

These prosthetic-brained leaders of ours will have to take a cue from the environment’s best friend, the Dung Beetle, a master of waste management. The central idea here is that those of our leaders who truly want to do something positive about this open-defecation menace should be compelled to spend quality time with the Dung Beetle and learn its ways of dealing with waste management. We do not do this and yet expect these leaders to solve the problem of open defecation.

What a country of crazy-baldhead jokers and blackface entertainers we have for leaders. Well, we have said a mouthful—no doubt!

CONCLUDING REMARKS

“In 15 years, between now and 2030, we need to support over five million Ghanaians to stop defecating in the open, but currently it looks like it will take 500 years unless we make changes now…

“So, behavior and attitudinal change is what we require…So, we must educate our people, we must create awareness…

“We do not want our tourists coming here and directing their cameras towards people defecating in the open at the beaches rather than zooming the camera on the forts and castles that we have here…” (David Duncan).

Ghana stinks to high heaven for a number of reasons reason. The criminal mindset of the ruling class, the unpatriotic and I-don’t-care attitude of the average Ghanaian, and the ordinary Ghanaian’s scientific ignorance about the interesting world of microorganism are a few of those reasons.

Thus encouraging investment in preventive measures in terms of education, that is, creating a wider scope of public awareness about the dangers of open defecation and poor waste management, about the relationship between public health and economic development/productivity, among others is extremely important as far as protecting the integrity of the soul of the nation is concerned.

It is strange how some Ghanaians are quick to the causation of emerging diseases to superstition. Scientific knowledge of disease causation, of personal and public hygiene, and of epidemiology in general can go a long way to free the ordinary Ghanaian from the paralyzing shackles of superstition and ignorance.

When all is said and done, let the members of the ruling class ask themselves this innocuous question: Are we humans or animals? While others like the Chinese are turning human waste into biogas, fertilizer and biodiesel, we on the other hand allow pigs to feast on our feces and then later kill them for food.

What goes through the mind of a swine within eyeshot of a human beings sitting on mountains of open defecation? We have made ourselves look like animals. Are we that pig-headed? Are we dung beetles in human flesh?

We do know for a fact that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is sponsoring a similar project in Ghana but this philanthropic gesture merely constitutes only one of many solutions, a tangential one for that matter, as it does not directly address the social pandemia of open defecation.

It is our firm belief that if Ghanaians go about defecating around the properties of members of the ruling class something radical will be done about the problem by way of solution. Ghanaians should therefore take the battle of open defecation to the gates of the properties of their common enemy, the ruling class.

They must force Akufo-Addo to acknowledge or declare Independence Day as “Day of Infamy” or “Day of Shame”!

REFERENCES

Ghanaweb. “It’ll Take Ghana 500 Years To Stop Open Defecation—Unicef.” April 29, 2016.

Graphic Online. “Ghana @ 50 Ruling, State Appeals Against Mpiani, Wereko-Brobbey.” July 5, 2011.

Natasha Khan. (February 1, 2015). “China is Turning Fecal Sludge Into ‘Black Gold.’” Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-01/how-the-chinese-are-turning-fecal-sludge-into-black-gold-