Korley Klottey Municipal to introduce National Sanitation Day Register

By Eric Appah Marfo, GNA

Accra, July 9, GNA - Mr Samuel Nii Adjei Tawiah, Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) for Korley Klottey Municipal Assembly together with executives and stakeholders of the Assembly are set to introduce a National Sanitation Day Register to curb sanitation issues.

The Register would serve as an enforcement document to get citizens involved in curbing the municipal’s sanitation menace rather than looking up to the Assembly to do so.

Speaking on behalf of the MCE, Mr Victor Acquaye, Municipal Environmental Health Officer for the Assembly said the National Sanitation Day Register would help the Assembly identify the various entities in the municipality; be it domestic, commercial or cooperate.

Adding that, it would help them develop a register of the people staying in those areas after which they could move ahead to develop a schedule for subsequent cleanup exercises.

Mr Acquaye said this during a cleanup exercise organized at the weekend in Accra to commemorate the National Sanitation Day.

The rationale behind the cleanup was to promote the President’s agenda to make Accra the cleanest city in West Africa.

Mr Acquaye expressed the hope that the Register would be available in the next two months and that, they would use the month of July to identify all the places with specific issues; be it drain, over grown weeds or littering issues.

Then in the month of August, they would carry out a piloting of the initiative to see how well it worked and that if it proved successful, it would be replicated in other areas.

Mr Acquaye noted that communities which would be built into the Register would be served with a notice ahead of the subsequent Sanitation Day cleanup exercises and that, a team would be deployed to go round and take note of both participating and non-participating communities.

He said for those who would fail to participate in the cleanup, the Assembly would do the cleanup on their behalf and later surcharge them for the work that had been done.

Adding that, if they failed to pay the said amount, the Assembly would arraign them before court for not paying their debt.

“Alternatively, we could also come out with a sanction of taking them to court where we have served them notice and they failed to participate without any tangible excuse. We would arraign them before court to explain why they failed to participate in the National Sanitation Day even after they had been prompted ahead of time,” he added.

Mr Acquaye said if citizens were made to be involved in the curbing of their own sanitation problems, they would be responsible and stand up to anyone who littered their surroundings, because they knew they would be the ones to bear the consequences later on.

He said the Assembly would get citizens to do the cleaning while they only came in to facilitate the process of filth collection on the National Sanitation Day.

Mr Acquaye explained that even though a lot of mass media education was ongoing, the Assembly currently wanted to tailor the education to specific issues.

“If we know this area is faced with this particular sanitation related issue, we would go and engage them on that issue rather than give them a generic education which may not even concern them.

We are going to map out the various issues and address them one by one because we can’t use one approach to solve every problem,” he added.

The National Sanitation Day is observed on every first Saturday of the month.

The Korley Klottey Municipal Assembly organized this month’s cleanup exercise at five places namely; Apollo Theatre on the Ring Road, Tema Station, the Arts Centre and its environs, Oxford Street and Asylum Down Roundabout.

GNA

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