By Emmanuel Mensah-Abludo
The Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) for Wa, Tahiru Issahaku Moomin, says the Wa Municipal Assembly is doing all within its power to clear all refuse dumps in the Municipality.
He pointed out that the move is in line with the resolve to upscale environmental sanitation and hygiene. Mr. Moomin observed that sanitation and good health are critical ingredients for increased productivity.
The MCE made the observation at the inception of an exercise to evacuate more than four thousand tons of refuse in four Municipalities in the Upper West Region. The exercise involves the clearing of 21 waste dump sites in Wa, Lawra, Jirapa, and Sissala East Municipalities.
The initiative is a collaboration between Zoomlion Ghana Limited and the Ministry of Local Government, Decentralization and Rural Development. The MCE, Mr Moomin described the exercise as a strategic move to clear piles of refuse to ensure that the “lives and health” of the people are guaranteed. He indicated that Wa Municipality receives more than one-third of the population in Upper West who come to undertake one form of socio-economic activity or the other.
The MCE continued that as the people come in and leave, they generate a lot of waste which pile up in areas that are not on the radar of the Municipal Assembly, thereby creating sanitation challenges.
Mr Moomin said he is excited about the initiative to clear all the refuse, saying, they will make sure disposal of waste is controlled after the exercise.
The Wa Municipal Environmental Health Officer (MEHO), Paul Baba Morna appealed to the people to desist from setting waste materials in refuse containers on fire, because the practice destroys the receptacles for carting waste.
He added that price of one central refuse container which used to be six (6) thousand Ghana Cedis is now being sold at 20 thousand Ghana Cedis, making it very difficult for Assemblies to use the limited internally generated fund (IGF) to buy the containers.
Mr. Morna advised the public to resort to the use of door-to-door waste containers as a way of improving waste management. He called for waste separation as a way of making some financial returns. “Waste is no longer waste, we call it material-in-transition.
At any point, it has value, so we should try and make maximum use of the waste that we are getting [generating] because if we do sorting out, the plastic, we can sell them to the plastic people, then the metals, we can get people to buy because they use them to make iron rods and other things and then the organic can be used for compost,” Mr. Morna stated.
The Assembly Member for Mangu Electoral Area, Sakibu Mohammed stated that the evacuation of the trash is very important to the people of Mangu as far as their health was concerned.
Mr. Mohammed told the GBC that he and unit committee members will sensitize the people to desist from disposing of refuse at the site that has been cleared to improve the health of the residents.
