By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
June 11, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I have never met the man and have absolutely no desire of meeting him anytime soon. But by his flurry of flippant public comments and other remarks regarding the best way to keep filth in our cties and townships well under control, the Kumasi mayor does not come across to me as one who was appointed to the job on the basis of merit but rather on the strength of sheer cronyism. I have absolutely no problem with Mayor Bonsu going to bat for Dr. Oko Vanderpuije, his counterpart of the Accra metropolis; but to facilely and so vacuously pretend that garbage collecton and management were the responsibility of individual Ghanaian citizens is one that I cannot abide (See "Blame Yourself, Not Mayors - KMA Boss" The Chronicle / Ghanaweb.com 6/9/15).

If the preceding were really the case, then one ought to wonder whether the Ghanaian taxpayer has any need of economically supporting political parastes like the Kumasi metropolitan chief executive. You see, don't get me wrong; I fully appreciate the frustrations of Mayor Bonsu vis-a-vis the poor hygiene habits of the proverbial average Ghanaian. Nevertheless, the most constructive response to such patently undesirable attitude is to develop an efficient waste-management program by hiring more health inspectors and building state-of-the-art waste-management facilities in our cities and towns across the country. For instance, the government could start a recycling program for inorganic food packages and containers like bottles, both plastic and glass, as well as other non-biodegradable materials in order to drastically reduce the volume of unwanted garbage and other domestic disposables.

The preceding, of course, will require the existence of a viable manufacturing industrial culture which, sad to say, the Rawlings-led government of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) did a lot to criminally destroy. For instance, I quite remember while growing up, how some people used to go from house-to-house begging to be allowed to take away any empty soft-drink and beer bottles that were idling about the house. Sometimes one saw these people, largely male Ghanaians of northern descent, rummaging through mounds of garbage at public garbage-disposal grounds and waste-bins, pulling up bottles and other plastic items. Once I even asked a collector what these bottles were being collected for, and he told me that mineral-drink manufacturers like the Coca-Cola factory and the Accra Brewery bought and reused them.

Back then, I had absolutely no inkling that what this barely literate scavenger was describing to me is what is today called recycling. If memory serves me accurately, empty cans of Saturday-Night-Life talcum powder also used to be collected and scavenged for by these "unconscious" environmentalists and petty economic mavens, in retrospect. But I guess what I am even more interested in, vis-a-vis effective waste-management programs, is whether Mayor Bonsu and his counterparts across the country have any laws and ordinances prohibiting indiscriminate littering of our public spaces. Such laws, for example, could authorize health inspectors who caught any litterbugs contaminating the environment to issue summonses to these human vermin right on the spot and ordering them to promptly appear before magistrates and judges specifically appointed for this purpose to and pay fines. These health inspectors could even be authorized to collect spot fines, where the where the residential addresses of these offenders could not be readily located on the city map.

Such courts could be called Sanitation or Health courts. And fines could be increased on the basis of the number of times a litterbug was caught degrading the environment. The parents and guardians of minors - or children- caught in such disdainful acts could also be summonsed and fined for irresponsible parenting or guardianship. Where a culprit was unable to pay the fine at a reasonably stipulated time, the offender could be required to do community service or labor, such as cleaning our streets and gutters for a specified span of time, with the direct supervision of health inspectors. Revenue generated from the salutary program could then be used to supplement the local sanitation budget.

It is rather politically and administratively unimaginative to expect people to just barge out of their homes, like smoked-out firewood ants and cheerily line up behind a cheap publicity-hungry Mayor Bonsu, pretending to clean up the environment. In case Mayor Bonsu didn't already know this: sustainable environmental hygiene entails far more than this Mahama-fangled comical handpicking of litter which has more photo-op appeal than substance.

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