The madness known as Accra and the Millennium City Project

Accra does not make sense. Accra is broken. Accra is mad. Why is Accra mad? Oh, go figure! Haven’t you taken a look lately? Chaos galore! Lawlessness galore! A free-for all regime! Yet, we have all the bye-laws needed to run a city but they are not enforced.

You want to put a kiosk somewhere to sell whatever? Go ahead; have fun with it. At some point, any of the two D-Words – Decongestion and/or Demolition might chase after you. But the dust will quickly settle and you could move right back. You want to sell luscious yummy roasted ripe plantains over a funky gutter? Oh, just do what floats your boat. You want to throw your garbage, regardless of the quantity – sachet water, a bag of ‘bola’ – onto a street? Who can stop you? No one! You want to build your concrete house in water-ways? Go right ahead. Drivers are mad too; especially so! There are no elders in this town.

With the above as a backdrop, and the horrifying devastation of biblical proportions with earthquakes in the capital city of Haiti two weeks running, I am very excited about the recently announced Millennium City Project for Accra. We must give this initiative a chance, regardless of anyone’s negative feelings toward the Accra Metropolitan Assembly and its lush-bearded
Mayor, Alfred Nee Oko Vanderpuje. Let me state my case.

Accra’s madness is currently at a fever pitch and is brought into sharper focus when you observe the layers of development under and over the layers of under-development. It makes me wonder if the gods are crazy! Nothing makes sense. Accra cannot continue like this. The madness must stop. Now! If the status quo and/or the degeneration does not cease, imagine 5, 10, 20, or 30 years from now! If nothing changes, Accra will one-day one-day unravel.

We should not wait to become home to the unspeakable horrors of Haiti, the poorest country in the western Hemisphere, the Africa outside Africa, where poverty is so desperate and ugly and filthy that it can make you speechless and wanna cry; Where governance has long broken down, making the country win the accolade of a failed state.

Accra is in an earthquake-prone zone too. So imagine what would happen to Accra if the earth sneezes – etsssieen – and an earthquake comes a-licking? We’ll be buried under rubble, with life and death blending into one horrendous whole.

For the most part, the people of Haiti are our kith and kin – the confused descendants of slaves who were dumped on an island to labour in vain for slave masters, and who, long after the fact of liberation, have not figured out how to run their own affairs. Haiti gained independence in 1804, the first Black country anywhere in the world to do so. Ghana was the first African country to gain independence. The similarities are too eerie to catalogue.

That’s why we must give the Millennium City Project a chance. It’s OK if we can’t pronounce millennium. You might pronounce it as ‘miririum’ or ‘milliniom’ and no one would put you into prison for funky pronunciation. Millennium is a statement about having arrived. If this project does not work out, we are toast and Accra will surely unravel.

Last year, my work took me to a fascinating ingenious state-of-the-art development project in a forgotten part of the country, which is only one hour drive from Kumasi. It is dubbed the Millennium Villages Project (MVP); located at Bonsaaso, a leading cocoa producing part of the country. This project aims at changing the depressing circumstances of the inhabitants of a cluster of what has from time immemorial, been a deprived, poverty-stricken villages. The project applies science, as well as tried and tested best practices to improve the living conditions of the people.

As I got closer to the community, I witnessed the magic of MVP. In several meetings with the residents, I heard joy and hope because of the interventions of MVP. Politicians and governments had failed them over and over again. They go to them for votes then move on in complete disregard of their needs. They had no health care facilities, no schools beyond the basic, no motorable roads, no electricity, and no pipe borne water. In short, they had nothing.

Entered MVP! In just a period of three years, hope has replaced hopelessness and a dying community is rising from the dull ashes of national snobbishness. Step-by-step, little-by-little, lives are being changed. The human condition of the residents of the cluster of villages is already showing improvement through the implementation of measures to lovingly and tenderly guide them.

The successes are many – still counting. A health care facility, ambulance service, improved agricultural practices, a school feeding programme – and these are not connected with any national programmes of similar names.

What’s the relevance of the MVP to Accra, our mad house of a capital city? The same concept that informs the efforts to improve rural communities might be applied to Accra by the same consortium led by The Earth Institute of Columbia University of the USA. Their strategies are working for the Bonsaaso villages so I’m hopeful that if we follow through, it would work out for Accra, madness and all.

The path Accra has embarked on is not sustainable. Accra needs a major intervention. Accra needs redemption. This city has nurtured its madness for a long time. This is a dysfunctional city par excellence, way beyond understanding. Modern trappings like house numbers and street names are foreign.

Accra is over-grown with a lawless population. Accra is exploding at the seams. The residents need drastic behavioural change in all aspects of city life. Accra has become ungovernable. Accra is crying desperately for sanity, for healing of the madness. Even Dr Akwasi Osei of the Accra Psychiatric Hospital will excuse himself. Understandably so!

Kumasi is already mad. Kwame Nkrumah will not recognize his well-planned well-built harbour city of Tema if he dares come out of his plush grave. Sekondi-Takoradi will become mad as petrol-dollars pour in. Tamale is tottering in madness. Mid-size towns are catching the madness flu. Our cities and towns are not breathing right.

Garbage piles up and we have no clue of how to manage the waste that is a natural offshoot of human existence. Plastic waste is choking us. Our gutters are a national shame. We don’t treat excreta. Accra, Sekondi-Takoradi and other coastal towns violate international protocols by dumping excreta directly into the Atlantic Ocean. Out of shame, Accra has nicknamed its liquid waste dumping site “Lavender Hill.”

Without the combination of a well-coordinated, incisive, surgical and meticulous intervention, Accra will implode – one day. As the capital city goes, so the country. The Millennium City Project might be a blessing from heaven. And, I can’t wait to experience heaven here on earth if at all possible. God is! But the journey will be tough. To change such a broken city will not be a walk in the park so gird your loins to be annoyed. Inconveniences galore! AMA should not disappoint us – again!

Everybody plays the fool, sometime – while sanitation suffers

I don’t know how it goes with you but with me, periodically, some old songs replay in my head, for no particular reasons at all. I may just be a pathetic case of a yet-to-be-diagnosed crazy, but well…… This past week, an oldie by Aaron Neville rushed through my tender mushy tissues –brain. Come on, sing along with me. Snap your fingers and break into a gentle dance:

“Everybody plays the fool, sometime;
There’s no exception to the rule.
Listen baby, it may be factual, may be cruel,
I ain’t lying, everybody plays the fool.”

Yes, although factual, it may be cruel to put it this bluntly. The state of our country’s environmental sanitation is a sign that we are playing games with finding a permanent solution to a problem that affects and threatens our health, the survival of our economy and our very existence as a people.

It appears that everybody is playing the fool, at least sometime, through our actions and inactions. Some people play the fool, all the time! Our leaders as well as We the People, severally and jointly, are all guilty in this fool-play through throwing garbage around by-heart, and worst of all, by not being vigilant to stop those who indiscriminately trash our country. What role have you, me and we played for us to get to where we are today in disgusting filth?

Sanitation is probably our most challenging national problem, standing firmly between us and survival, on our journey to develop. Clearly, whatever we have been doing so far to solve this problem is not working; not even making a dent in addressing the problem. Rather, things continue to move from bad to worse and further from worse to senseless ridiculousness. Our 52-year old Ghana looks as if it is a quiet helpless victim of cruel and endless vandalism that is unstoppable by even the laws we have put in our books to take care of such. Collection and proper disposal of garbage is a problem. Plastic garbage is taking over our landscape.

Yet, we proudly pronounce our intent to become a middle income country by 2015, six very short years away. What a joke! I’ve drawn a blank so please help me with the ending of this nursery rhyme: “If wishes were horses……” Knowledge gaps exist! Whatever a middle-income country looks like, one can boldly maintain that it must not look anything like this. Let’s face it, filth is engulfing us but we are not taking any concrete steps to change directions. We could try to get other things right but if we are unable to clean up this national mess, 2015 will come and go and we’ll still be wallowing in filth. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride!”

Meanwhile, administratively, sanitation is orphaned within a small department in the Ministry of Local Government. As part of the rationalization of the ministries, I had expected the President Mills’ administration to isolate sanitation as a ministry so it will receive the needed attention.

A certain theory I picked up during life’s journey is Broken Windows Theory, which for convenience, will be referred to here as BWT (referred to previously in this column). The theory simply posits that brokenness attracts more brokenness. Slums are created because little bits of brokenness are tolerated until over time, brokenness becomes the norm. A major implication of the theory is that when the appropriate measures are taken to promptly fix manifestations of brokenness, one could deter low-level anti-social behaviours as well as major crimes, and keep society on its toes.

Once upon a time, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani of September 11 terrorist attack fame, adopted BWT as part of general reform measures to clean up the then scary crime-ridden and filthy financial capital of the world, which was fast losing its shine because of anti-social behaviours of the likes of crime, filth and graffiti, as well as public intoxication, nuisance and urination. (Hahaha to Ghanaian men who shamelessly urinate in public – by the road-side!)

As part of the measures, the city authorities first zoomed in to symbolically solve some of its challenging problems including regular cleaning up of graffiti. Next, it began to enforce the laws, even laws for petty offences, if just to convey a symbolic message. The result of the initiative was the reduction of both petty and major crimes. The message was clear: no foolishness tolerated. And the message sank in with people who had hitherto, been disrespectful of the society, its laws, its morality and everything else it stood for.

Some of the enduring lessons and implications for us from BWT is that we should stop waiting forever before we clean up our acts. Everyday should be a sanitation day. If we clean up everyday, the filth will not mount. It is dangerous to start and stop, start and stop because it only worsens what is already bad. We should enforce our laws.

Brokenness is costly. Brokenness is ugly. Brokenness is filthy. Brokenness leads to more brokenness. Fact is: we are not on our toes in the matter or environmental sanitation and that is why we spit our laws in the face with impunity.

Picture these two scenarios in our own society:

Esi, an eight year old girl takes out the family garbage to fulfil her family obligation of chores. She finds no one looking so hurriedly, out of habit, dumps the bucket filled with funky household trash by the roadside and moves on. The trash stays. A few week’s after, the garbage mound grows because others added to it. Esi’s little first bucket-full of garbage on the spot conveyed this clear message: “Garbage is welcome here.” In effect, her act was symbolic – the first little broken window. Because it was not checked, it resulted in the creation of an unplanned community garbage-dumping site where everybody can literally play the fool, unchecked.

Next comes Honourable Nana Professor Yoofi, a grown man, looking very respectable – clearly, an important person in society, driving the newest series Mercedes Benz through the Nkrumah Circle in Accra. He casually rolls down his car window and absent-mindedly throws out a plastic waste and corn cob, and quickly rolls up the window and continues his drive in air-conditioned comfort and bliss. The garbage is out of his hands and beautiful car so it has gone away. Not!

He knows for sure that there would be no repercussions for his actions. So although he would not throw garbage around in his personal space at home or office, he drops anything anywhere in town. Woe besides anyone who dares to challenge him. He will fly off his mighty high horse with insults in a fit of self-importance because he is well connected. He is clearly untouchable; not prosecutable. He might boldly ask, with chest out: “Do you know who I am?” The matter rests! Others join in because it is a garbage-party and all are welcome. Children learn the bad habit because it appears right. No one cares.

Imagine how different these scenarios would have played out and shaped up if these acts of brokenness had been nipped in the bud just when they occurred through bold strategies including law enforcement, naming and shaming, and general community-wide intolerance of brokenness.

Dear readers, chew on this. We are sitting on a national sanitation time-bomb that is ticking very fast. We will return to this matter. But until then, keep singing the song – “Everybody plays the…..”

Smoking out Accra residents with toxins

Increasingly, when I’m away from my bedroom, I feel like a rat. If you’re an Accra resident, you must be feeling that way too. But we’re not rats so why are we being given the rat-smoke treatment? After all, rats are candidates to be smoked out of holes for soup or placed on sorry crucifixes to be paraded for sale by roadsides. Where are we supposed to go after we’ve been smoked out of Accra? To the cemetery – frothing at the mouth with smoke-filled lungs!

I want to see my insides, specifically my oesophagus all the way into my lungs. I also want to see the insides of Police Officers who spend hours by the roadside to direct traffic (and for bonus, collect petty bribes), and of our children who literally live by busy roadsides selling whatever they lay hands on. With the rampant smoke inhalation, our insides can’t be pretty. Most likely, there are multi-coloured blotches, bumps and scar tissues here and there. Our own country is killing us softly, with toxic smoke.

There are two major sources of toxic smoke: emissions from smoke-haemorrhaging vehicles and the indiscriminate burning of an odd-medley of garbage. They are both illegal acts, according to AMA bye-laws. But we flout the rules not caring a hoot because the rules are not enforced. Just collect your garbage and torch it; no one will stop you. Or, like pulling off a trigger, drive your smoke-puffing vehicle and zoom off, even by police officers, and you will be let off. Will these lawless, criminal acts go on forever? Accra is transforming very fast, but in ways which do not make sense. Accra is a dysfunctional city.

Here are some frightening facts about toxic smoke. It has harmful effects on human health and the environment. Vehicular smoke emissions and the burning of garbage, especially man-made substances like plastics, rubber and foam-type disposable containers (‘take-away’ food trays and cups) release toxins into the atmosphere. Some of these chemicals are absorbed into the body through the skin and nostrils. Smoke not meant for humans therefore make grand entrance, unhindered, to find resting places in our bodies.

The repercussions from an accumulation of toxins in the human body are many. For instance, they can be passed on to unborn babies. Some settle in water-ways and on crops, and get into our food. An online fact sheet of the Women in Europe for a Common Future (WECF) states that such toxins increase the risk of heart disease, cause rashes, trigger off headaches, damage the nervous system, kidney and liver, and affect the reproductive and development system.

Enters Dr Edith Clarke of the Environmental Health unit of the Ghana Health Services. She maintains that the garbage we burn emits persistent organic pollutants like carbon and sulphur dioxide which remain in the environment for several years. Persistent means that like rascals, these chemicals are stubborn, determined, relentless and ruthless. Once they enter the human body, they stay put until they do whatever damage they have the potency to cause. These pollutants cause cancer and aggravate respiratory ailments like pneumonia, asthma and bronchitis. Scary stuff!

A 2008 US study found that air pollutants from vehicle smoke fumes mimic the damaging effects of cigarette smoke in humans. Non-smokers could therefore develop tobacco-related diseases like lung cancer. So for breathing in these pollutants, we are at risk for cardio-pulmonary and many other not-so-nice diseases.

Since as a country we don’t plan to make a journey into outer space anytime soon, messily sending our smoke into the atmosphere might be our own nauseous way of touching the hallowed face of God. Our many high-octane Christian pretenders should ponder over this: Does God appreciate our smoke to mess up the stunning firmament of His throne upstairs? Definitely not!

Enters King David School at Teshie. The photograph on this page was taken on Friday, November 7, 2008 at 9:45 am. Take a close look at the actions in the photograph. There are more than forty children in the 4-10 year age-bracket. About 20 of them were playing football with one teacher refereeing the match. A heap of typical Ghanaian garbage – plastics, paper, leaves and odd-assortments – was burning close to the play-ground, emitting apparently over-powering toxic smoke.

Two other teachers are relaxed under a lush green tree nearby, in a conversation posture, oblivious to the looming smoke inhalation danger. These teachers are adults and must know better than to expose themselves and the children under their supervision to this frightening environmental sanitation hazard. What would King David of bible days, the obvious inspiration of the name of this school, do/say? He’ll dance butt-naked, in wild protest!

We patiently await complaints from owners/proprietors of King David School that reference to them in this article is damaging to their image. How about the toxic dangers the school exposes to the children? The potential ailments that might kill these innocent kids in future because of today’s toxicity they are inhaling will be attributed to wicked grandmothers and grandaunts and other older woman in their general neighbourhood! Oh, the misery of womanhood!

Fact: we are all at risk. Even the privileged few who ride in air conditioned vehicles with glass windows tightly rolled up have good amounts of smoke sneaking in through the natural holes of the vehicles. The smoke freely makes its way into their widely-open African nostrils. The other day, I saw a police officer at Tetteh Quarshie Interchange with a handkerchief over his nose. Lesson: we should all cover our noses in Accra as a survival strategy. No one is safe.

So I’ve also adopted smoke management strategies when riding in a vehicle in Accra with car windows open. I place a pack of tissue paper or a clean handkerchief over my nose. Periodically, I hurriedly hold my breath when I see a puff of smoke suddenly and freshly released from a moving vehicle nearby. But periodically, I get caught in shock-and-awe smoke-puff kill-me-quick situations with no tissue paper or handkerchief. When that happens, I become a full sucker of vehicle fumes and roadside garbage burning smoke.

Not that the handkerchief/tissue saves me from smoke inhalation. At best, it sieves the smoke and gives me a false feeling that I’ve out-smarted the smoke. This is not an effective strategy so I’ve cranked up a more sophisticated but ridiculous method. Soon, I’ll carry clean face towels and a flask filled with fresh water. Periodically, I’ll wet a towel and place it on my pint-sized nose. After a while of passing through Accra, I’ll abandon the polluted towel and replace it with another freshly wet towel. Or, I’ll use nose masks. This could become a fashion statement in Accra! We should all wear nose masks like smog-filled Beijing during last year’s Olympic Games in China.

But the EPA and AMA could save us from ourselves by adopting several strategies. One of them should be to set up a toll-free phone system for the public to send reports of registration numbers of smoking vehicles and information on neighbours who burn garbage by either text message or phone calls. Such vehicles must be chased off our roads and garbage burners must be accosted immediately by ‘Boola Police.” Fine idea? You bet, but implementation will fizzle out just like toxic smoke in our nostrils.

dorisdartey@yahoo.com

Christmas and New Year Wishes for Ghana: No More Open Gutters

For the past few weeks, this column has been dense. Mighty toes have been stepped on, pushing some soft buttons of society. So in the spirit of Christmas, and as is the tradition of this column, we break for a soft issue – gutters. Here are two gutter tales.

Man meets woman. Man and woman wait – for love to happen. Then, boom, it happens. In the early days of love, they hold hands to walk. He holds her hands delicately. Reason: she is delicate. She needs protection. When crossing a road, she is shepherded, lest she hurts herself. Is it happiness? Yes, it is nirvana. In our world of gutters, you need protection from gutters to get to nirvana. Your legs, my legs, our legs are in constant danger, with gutters staring threateningly. So man holds woman’s hands to cross the smallest of gutters. He says, “Darling, watch the gutter,” long after woman has crossed. Well, she is an experienced gutter-crosser. She knows the ways of gutters.

Then, time passes. Love grows dim. Rust sets in. Love fatigue looms. Love wanes. Hand holding ceases, left firmly in the distant past. Now, man and woman simply walk, crossing gutters on waned love’s journey. Baby gutters, grandfather gutters, mama gutters, uncle gutters, cousin gutters. Woman walks slowly, pained from many life’s ordeals. Then it happens. One day, man walks with woman. Man walks past hurriedly from woman. Woman trips, falls in gutter. Man continues to walk on. Then looks back and yells at woman, “You fool! Have you gone blind? Didn’t you see that big gutter?”

Man continues to walk away, into the gloomy distance – dulled antennae reigning supreme. Clueless! Woman drags her sore self out of gutter – mud and all. Woman continues walk, limping on, deeply hurt. She leaves remnants of love behind – in the gutter. A severe love body-blow has just occurred – a watershed moment with gutter as principal witness. Gutter is also the smoking gun.

Another gutter tale. This girlish woman I know was driving a pack-of-tin, an engineering feat called a car. Her cell phone rings. She picks up. The caller was a very close friend, a sort of boy friend. He needs to talk, so badly. She needs to talk, for no particular reason. Smoothly, she drives on, yapping, not paying attention to the world around as if a vehicle is nothing but jelly. Soon, the conversation settles in a place between the devil and the deep blue sea. Meanwhile, she was dodging pot holes, baby coffins, bounces hunch-back speed bumps, and sidesteps several careless but confident road-crossers and many other categories of predators in-built into our roads. She slows down, wallops and gallops on.

Then suddenly, it happens! She drives car into a muddy gutter. In the cell phone distraction, she did not notice the accident so kept accelerating, wheels spinning, until yells and teasing laughter from youthful passers-by brought the message home. So she got off the phone to see to the predicament. It took more than a dozen men and a gutter engineering feat, with planks, to yank car out of gutter. She thanks helpers with some cedis and speeds off, still yapping on the phone. Within minutes, car begins to lose power. Then, yells from a new batch of onlookers bring another message home – the car was puffing out smoke, almost burning. She parks the car, shaken.

What are the lessons from these gutter tales? It is plain folly to drive and talk on the cell phone. It could even be suicidal. But more so, there are too many monstrous gutters waiting with smiles, to suck us into their gaping mouths. And, there is no one to sue if you become a gutter casualty. Decentralized assemblies? Let’s explore that!

Open gutters are a prominent canvas on our landscape. Gutters here, gutters there, gutters everywhere! Gutters have drawn battle lines between humans and nasty falls. The battle rages on as more gutters are constructed with cement cast firmly into the earth. The more our development and civilization take shape, the more roads we construct. And wherever there are roads, gutters with gaping holes appear.

What makes our gutters unique is that they are open. In developed countries, gutters are not seen. Well, gutters are not meant to be seen. They belong in the underworld. So I asked a gutter expert, Engineer Kofi H (he begged me not to disclose his surname) why our gutters are not covered but left open to stare at us rudely, teasingly and dangerously. If our goal is to become a middle-income country by 2015, when will it show in our gutters?

His responses were instructive. He said bluntly, “We’re not ready for covered gutters. We’re not there yet!” In shock, I exclaimed, “What!!” He explained: “What we call gutters are ‘drains’ constructed for storm/rain water. There are roadside drains (small gutters) and storm drains (large gutters). But our gutters are choked with garbage and silt. Covered gutters are so difficult to clean.”

I retorted, “If gutters are covered, the bad people of Ghana will not be tempted to dump garbage into them.” He responded, “Some bad people go to the extent of lifting slabs of covered gutters to push in their garbage!” He insisted that until behavioral change occurs, our gutters will be left uncovered! So I’m left wondering – how about enforcement? Set example with some culprits through arrests, stiff sentencing and publicity. Let’s name and shame the bad people, consistently.

It is Christmas and we are on the cusp of a New Year. Yet, I’m grumpy about open gutters! You should too! They are inelegant; no, they are ugly. And, they are stinky, spewing out nasty leachate. Gutters are dangerous. People, animals and vehicles fall into them. Besides, gutters are at the heart of our sanitation dilemma because they are receptacles for strange things including obnoxious ‘take-aways’ of people who live in homes without toilets. When it rains, gutters become turbo-charged and gush out water and the numerous things stashed in them. Choked gutters cause floods which lead to misery and death.

I’m terrified of gutters. They stare at me menacingly and with such intensity that I suspect they beckon me to enter whether I’m driving or walking. I suspect that gutters are living beings with eyes, ears, mouths and brains. And souls too! And, living beings breed and/or live in them. Gutters provide comfortable home for insects, frogs, weeds, germs and many despicable creatures of the underworld.

A little gutter psychology. When you go through life seeing the insides of gutters over and over again, and they stare right back at you, how does that experience affect the way you think, your world view and your very psyche? Are open gutters messing us up psychologically in such a deep way to the point that we don’t find much wrong with overwhelming our environment with filth? Could it be that open gutters have become like tumors on our national conscience? In Les Miserables, Victor Hugo said: “The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers…. The sewer is the conscience of a city.” Wherein lies our collective conscience? Chew on this. Merry Christmas!

dorisdartey@yahoo.com