Fighting Open Defecation In Ghana Is A Real Big Battle

_{The Founder of the International Central Gospel Church, (ICGC) in Ghana Dr Mensah Otabil once said urinating in public is sub-animal behaviour.}

_{“The person who urinates by the wall can’t aspire to greatness…..because he has reduced himself to animal level,” the ICGC man said in his Living Word Series Friday September 19, 2014 on private FM station, Joy.}

_{Ghana’s population is said to be around 26 million. So I guess more than 13 million of us, I am a Ghanaian, are sub-animals because we wee-wee rough around every day.}

_{Indeed I just got down from the second floor offices of a state-owned media organization, pushed against the fence-wall of an adjacent office block and splashed it there, just like that. I will return.}

_{Ho is a municipality, indeed the capital of the Volta Region. Resident Population is 177,281. It off-course a transient population.}

_{Imagine, Kwaku Nugodo, is on a medicine that stimulates urination. He is walking some 600 meters from the offices of the Volta Regional Administration to the main public transport terminus in Ho.}

_{Nugodo, will have to do it against the wall somewhere, somehow, because there is no public urinal on the way, even if it is as stinky as one I entered at the Abor lorry station some time ago.}

_{Indeed this article is not about open urination but open defecation. But just as urination is a precursor to defecation, I could not resist devoting the prelude of this piece to it, urination. After all the two are bedfellows.}

_{Urine is liquid human waste, faeces is solid and a real, real bother in Ghana.}

_{Plenty mounds of it are dropped haphazardly across the country, from the sandy beaches through the shrubs to the forests and to the northern savannahs.}

_{It is dropped in corners along street alleys, river banks or parceled as ordinary garbage, and put into community garbage containers.}

_{Nineteen percent of Ghanaians, according to David Duncan, Chief Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Officer at United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), is in the business of open defecation.}

_{I think that is on the low side considering the other statistics that says 85.1 per cent of Ghanaians don’t have access to toilets.}

_{Dr Afia Zakiya, Country Director, WaterAid, Ghana, in a speech during 2015 World Toilet Day Celebration in Ghana gave some breakdown.}

_{“60 per cent of the people (Ghanaians) are without toilets and shared toilets, while six per cent resort to unimproved toilets with 19 per cent engaging in open defecation,” she stated.}

_{Dr Zakiya, touching on the world scene said, “out of the estimated 2.3 billion people across the world who do not have access to safe and private toilets, “1 billion have no choice but to defecate in the open…..”}

_{Nii Lante Vanderpuye, when he was Deputy Minister of Local Government, revealed that about 45 per cent of the population of Ghana’s capital Accra engage in open defecation.}

_{He was speaking at the handing over ceremony of a 12-seater biofilm toilet facility, donated by Fidelity Bank to the Maurice R/C JHS in La, someday in 2015.}

_{I was travelling to Hohoe. In the minibus was a white lady, an American I guess. Some 45 minutes drive more to get to Hohoe, the lady complained of bubbling in the stomach and wanted a place to defecate.}

_{The driver parked at the outskirts of a town and asked her to enter the shrubs and do it there.}

_{She got down alright, confused and blushing, got back into the bus. There were murmurs.}

_{One woman quipped, “she probably isn’t really feeling like it,” translated from vernacular.}

_{I believe in her culture you just don’t squat and do it anywhere in the bushes along the highways.}

_{This coming narration is an irony incomparable. It happened in Ho, Volta Regional capital.}

_{As part of the project to stop open defecation, a bus pulled up at the frontage of offices of the Ghana News Agency to pick up a group of journalists for a programmed visit to two communities. One was said to be open defecation free and the other had abundance of it.}

_{As they were set for the journey, I saw a female passer-by put a piece of broad leaves on the ground for her about 3 year old son to do it there.}

_{No pretense! I have done it (defecated) in the open before. Years ago under the hills around OLA Senior High School and in Accra.}

_{In Accra, I had trekked through Asylum Down, where I ate supper-roadside rice mixed with beans, going with a lot of really hot sauce, on the way to Accra Newtown}

_{When my stomach rumbled and it was obvious I could not reach home, where else in Accra Newtown could l have dropped it.}

_{I entered a public toilet and shrank, as there were hundred or more mounds of it. I did it there, not all, and left.}

_{There is yet another irony. In an attempt to improve the situation government, yes I meant government, wrote letters to tenants residing in government quarters still using pan latrines to convert or be prosecuted.}

_{Some of them have offloaded the stuff themselves into shallow dugouts for years, so that now, eight years and more on, effusions radiate in those areas after light rains and hand about for hours.}

_{Strange but it is true. Some few tenants by some weird tenancy agreements, do not use the toilet in the house, it is reserved for the landlord.}

_{The few happenings and realities have been replayed to tell how dismal the situation is, so that as a nation, we get to work to tackle it and not relax when the projects tackling open defecation elapse.}

_{Yes indeed, take it or leave it, projects in Ghana attract people like vultures to carcasses, many drawn by the cash available to spend and not project objectives.}

_{I dare say, therefore, that tackling open defecation in Ghana will have to go beyond transient projects, because the problem is deep seated, perhaps cultural.}

_{Low incomes, poor planning, unbridled population growth, weak local governance and indiscipline combine to keep the problem raging.}

_{What is the situation in some other countries?}

_{I commissioned Mawuli, a brother to give some insight into defecation practices in other countries and I found his report interesting.}

_{Singapore
The best public sanitation I have ever seen. Toilets are all over and nicely cleaned. People are disciplined and just do not even drop litter anywhere. Generally the place is clean.}

_{Namibia
Windhoek is the best city I have ever been to in Africa in terms of hygiene and sanitation. There are no open drains but there is also no piece of paper or plastic destroying the beauty of the place. Even their supposed shanty towns are well organized.}

_{Swaziland
The streets are clean in Mbabane, Manzini, Nhlangano and Siteki. Even in the small towns no one urinates anywhere. There are neat public toilets.}

_{London & Vienna
There is some discipline but not like Singapore. In Melbourne also, there is discipline. All train stations have functioning toilets.}

_{Accra
Very poor sanitation! I entered an Accra Mall, went in to find out the state of the toilet and I was not impressed. It did not have litter on the floor but the smell in the toilet was not pleasant.}

_{Our problem is our cities and towns do not have toilets worth the name so you cannot go there. The last time I was in Accra, any time I wanted to pee while in town, I had to look for a decent hotel or a restaurant, buy something, and ask to use the toilet. The only time I went into a public toilet was at the Kaneshie station. It caused me nightmares for days! I was shocked.}

_{In Swaziland the Ministry of Health closes down any premises without proper toilets -even whole Ministries and government schools. You cannot establish an office or a shop when there is no PROPER toilet in the building or arcade. The inspectors come and inspect before you obtain a license to operate.}

_{Mawuli’s narration has ended.
In Ghana, you don’t need to have a toilet adjoined to the now in vogue “container shop” to operate. And there are millions of them. A Container Shop is metal crafted into a chamber, sometimes with ventilation.}

_{We have as many open markets in Ghana as there are towns, and they don’t have toilets.}

_{I bet you, even churches, some with long hours of worship, don’t have toilets.}

_{If “open defecation is deemed the riskiest of all poor sanitation practices, posing the greatest danger to human health and potentially having fatal consequences particularly for the most vulnerable, children,” then the battle is crucial and must be won and quickly too.}

_{And the opponent has a fearsome arsenal as experts say, “one gramme of human faeces contains over 10 million germs, and once faeces is exposed, coming into contact with it is very easy”.}

_{Can you imagine how many of the pieces of papers, leaves, polythene bags and corn husks flying around in gusty storms, had been used by perpetrators of open defecation, to clean their anuses?}

_{I believe by now the reader will accept that open defecation is widespread and ingrained, needing comprehensive ways of tackling it.}

_{I suggest kids right from kindergartens are taught about open defecation and its dangers. Indeed this should run through the curricula from the beginning classes to the tertiary level until victory is won over the canker.}

_{Local governance must improve and fast too. The bylaws governing the building of houses, shops, markets, churches, mosques, transport terminals must be in tandem with eradicating the practice of tucking a coarse paper in your armpit and going into the bush to do it there.}

_{Tackling open defecation I believe is intertwined with the economic fortunes of the state, especially personal incomes.}

_{In the situation where many working class Ghanaians hang dangerously at the hems of the supposed increasing national prosperity, poorly accommodated, feeding dangerously below recommended daily nutritional and calorie levels and generally living without luster, they are unable to be the change agents.}

_{Many of these agents, themselves, including environmental health officers, could be perpetrators of open defecation.}

_{So when the change agents are trapped by economic, socio-cultural circumstances, they can hardly join with their traditional leaders and relatives, morally and materially, to tackle open defecation left, right and center.}

_{But the war against the canker, must be won not in 500 years, as pronounced by David Duncan, Chief of WASH, during a two-day capacity building workshop organized by the Parliamentary Press Corps. Venue was Cape-Coast and theme, Open Defecation-A menace in Ghana.}

_{The battle must be led by local government agencies, working in collaboration with chiefs.}

_{Indeed in that battle, formation should be, all Ghana on one side and Open Defecation on the other side and the armour, commitment, battle cry, now!}