Assembly To Fund Toilets

Ho, Dec. 31, GNA - Mr Mawutor Goh, Ho District Chief Executive (DCE), on Tuesday said the District Assembly would not yield to requests to fund the building of public toilets in exclusive private residential areas in the Ho township.
He said the law required every household to provide the facility and explained that public toilets were meant for floating populations and not permanent residents.
The DCE was reacting to concerns raised by Mrs Joan Awunyo-Akaba, Director of Future Generations, a non-governmental organisation on the widespread defecating in nooks and open places in Ho.
It was at forum on good governance organised by the District Assembly in collaboration with the Netherlands Development Co-operation (SNV).
Mr Goh said the best the Assembly could do for people living in residential to support a private sector developer to build and operate toilets.
He expressed that there were many homes in Ho without toilets and warned that prosecutions of people for indiscriminate defecation and other infractions of the environmental laws would continue. Mr Goh suggested that agencies that approved housing plans should insist that houses for personal use and those for renting were provided with toilets.
Mr Felix Seloame, an Assistant Town Planning Officer, reacting to complaints by a contributor that the newly developing area in the town lacked access roads to facilitate the disposal of waste, said the absence of base maps for those areas made planning difficult.
He could not tell whether such maps existed but were not made available to the District Assembly by the Survey Department.