WE'VE TO CHANGE OUR ATTITUDE

In our last Saturday’s edition we spoke about how filth has engulfed the various metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies in the country.
Because of the serious health and related problems garbage accumulation in our cities and towns create, we are forced to discuss the issue once again. The bottom line of our problem today is our attitude towards sanitation.
Our attitude is that when it comes to disposal of wastes we do not have any value, for we throw them anywhere anyhow without giving a thought to the repercussion of our actions.
This is seen in the way we litter our streets, markets and other public places in our cities and towns and in our villages and rural communities, at our river banks, just to mention but a few.
What is painful is that in the past we had good sanitation practices in our villages where you will see community members sweeping their compounds and adjoining areas.
In those days it was very common for some rural communities to set aside specific days for communal exercise to clean up their surroundings.
Whilst this practice is not entirely gone from our rural communities, it has dramatically reduced due to pressures of modern-day life and particularly because of our complete indifference and the promotion of individual interests.
In our towns and cities today even when people sweep their compounds and frontages, they dump the rubbish in gutters, others gather their garbage and dump it at any open spaces they can find.
Along our coastal areas people defecate on the white sandy beaches with careless abandon.
All these we do without thinking about their implication for our health.
But it is about time we started to change the way we think, feel and behave towards our surroundings: We should have an attitudinal change in our society towards sanitation.
We should stop the way we throw things out of cars onto the streets, we should stop throwing papers and empty plastic water bags and what have you, at any place we find ourselves and start to make conscious efforts to avoid throwing things about indiscriminately. We should stop the littering.
Because our surroundings speak volumes about us: When your surroundings are dirty people presume you are dirty and rightly so.
As we admonish the populace against bad sanitation practices, we in the same way call on the metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies to mount more litter bins at vantage points in their various communities for people to dispose of their rubbish.
In Accra for example, Zoomlion, a leading sanitation company, has placed litter bins at vantage areas but these are not enough. Others need to reciprocate this good example.
The assemblies should also strengthen their various enforcement agencies so that when people flout the bye-laws on sanitation especially littering and wrong disposal of refuse they could be arrested, prosecuted and given stiffer penalty to serve as a deterrent to other people who flout the law.
As the Minister of Local Government, Rural Development and Environment, Mr Kwadwo Adjei-Darko, pointed out last Friday, sanitation should not be the burden of only the city authorities. It indeed requires the collective effort of all.
We all need to be very disciplined and stop littering our public places with small pieces of rubbish such as paper, cans and bottles.
For us to have clean cities and towns we need to change our attitudes towards sanitation.