The Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) for Bolgatanga, Rex S. A. Asanga has indicated that the municipal assembly is considering the prosecutions of house owners who fail to provide toilet facilities in their homes.
Speaking in an interview on Dreamz FM’s State of Our Nation, Rex Asanga noted that many landlords and landladies have put up houses and renting them out without providing toilet facilities. This, he asserted, is unacceptable and must not be allowed to continue.
He disclosed that the assembly, in the coming days, will issue such house owners ultimatums to provide toilet facilities in their homes. The MCE added that the assembly is resolute in ensuring that every household in the Municipality has a toilet facility and thus, will deploy all means including taking legal actions to have house owners especially recalcitrant ones to comply with its directive.
“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.
Mr. Asanga made this disclosure while detailing measures his outfit is taking to deal with the insanitary situation in the Upper East Regional capital. He stated that the assembly is overwhelmed by the sanitation situation in the Municipality as its efforts and that of waste management company, Zoomlion to keep the town clean are being thwarted by activities of residents.
“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”.
He added “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”.
The MCE, however, reiterated the local government’s commitment to tackling poor sanitation in the Municipality, indicating that it will change its approach in tackling the insanitary situation by creating a 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.
