A renowned legal practitioner and a human rights activist, Francis-Xavier Kojo Sosu is calling on government to legalize the national sanitation day for a clean and healthy environment.
Lawyer Sosu made the call in response to the low patronage recorded at the beginning of each month when the national sanitation day cleaning exercise takes place.
According to him, the 1992 constitution directs as a matter of policy and good governance that effective and active steps are taken to promote access to basic sanitation which includes the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of all individuals, right to life, right to human dignity and right to safe environment.
Speaking to the DAILY HERITAGE in an interview, he said the sanitation problem has been the biggest challenge confronting most developing countries in Africa and various efforts are being made by stakeholders to have the issue resolved. He said a dirt-free environment cannot be realized if there is no behavioral change.
Ghana in 2010 adopted an Environmental Sanitation Strategy and Action Plan to raise awareness about the need to change the sanitation-behavior of the people.
“As the years go by, it is becoming more difficult to deal with these behavioral changes; open defecation, indiscriminate littering and improper waste disposal,” he said.
The lawyer added that due to the poor management of sanitation issues in the country, the nation has recorded over 42, 170 cholera cases with more than 400 deaths within a period of three years, a situation he attributed to poor sanitation.
In the area of malaria, he revealed that the Ghana National Malaria Control Programme in 2013 alone recorded more than 11.3 million cases with an average of 30,300 cases on daily basis across the country, while the country spends millions of dollars each year to curb the situation.
“There is no better way of controlling cholera and malaria except its prevention and this cannot be done unless the people themselves have a change of mind and attitude, successive governments have failed in fighting these menaces because they themselves are not ready to change,” he lamented.
He said in the case of Ghana, the people only need leadership to make the move and that cannot happen unless the government of the day makes its constitutionally mandatory.
Lawyer Sosu called on the government to establish a sanitation court that will expeditiously deal with sanitation cases, as well as Sanitation Task Forces in all the Metropolitan Municipal and District Assemblies across the country.
“When it comes to sanitation, we are all guilty in fighting for a clean Ghana. And what we need is a National Sanitation Act that will mandate every citizen to keep the city and the country clean,” he stated.
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