Municipal Chief Executive(MCE) for Bolgatanga Rex Asanga has detailed plans to deal ruthlessly with landlords who build without providing toilet facilities to their tenants.
He notes that there are several houses in the Municipality that have been rented out but does not have toilet facilities for the tenants.
He said this worrying feature is thwarting the effort at ensuring that sanitation conditions in the Upper East Regional capital of Bolgatanga are improved.
“There are some houses that the landlords have never cared to provide toilet facilities. You have a 4 corner house of 14 rooms and people are staying there, I don’t think we should allow that to continue. Eventually, we are going to give landlords who have no toilet facilities to have to provide the facilities within a certain period other than that we will apply the appropriate sanctions, if it means taking people to court for the court to give them order to provide toilets in their homes within 3 or 4 months, we are prepared to do that,” he said.
“Sanitation is a real challenge for the assembly. Despite the intervention by Zoomlion and also our own interventions, it is becoming a big problem. It is a problem because of the psyche and the mind and thinking of us all. We think that it is the duty of someone else to clean the mess that we cause around.
Until we all have a certain mindset and decide that sanitation or keeping our environment clean is a collective responsibility and not just the responsibility of some laborers of the assembly and Zoomlion, we will continue to have the problem that we are having. So I think that it is a major problem. We are overwhelmed with even the collection. Zoomlion is doing its bid but I think that it is not enough.”
Identifying the worrying trend of setting fire in refuse containers by unidentified people, the MCE said “All those big containers have been burnt. People set fire to the rubbish in those containers and they easily get spoilt. We have a lot of them in our office and we are supposed to replace them. If I tell you the price of one, it is quite a huge amount of money. So you see that some communities you get there, because the container has been burnt and taken away, they don’t have a receptacle for rubbish”.
He insisted that the local government is bent on ensuring that the sanitation condition improves and will change its approach by instilling some sense of responsibility in residents to keep their surroundings clean.
“So besides the decongestion and the revenue mobilization, sanitation is our third leg that we want to tackle very vigorously. And we are not going to tackle it by way of running after people and collecting their mess, we are going to tackle it and also create a sense of responsibility in people. For instance, I don’t see why somebody has a container, a kiosk next to the road and the person dumps rubbish from his/her container into the gutter and somebody else will come and clean. We are going to make it a responsibility of everybody who has a shop, container or whatever to ensure that the gutter next to you is kept clean. If you clean your side, the other person clean their side, we will be solving the problem of sanitation,” he posited.
Source: MyNewsGh.com
