Cecilia Abena Dapaah
Sanitation and Water Resources Minister-designate, Cecilia Abena Dapaah, has called on Ghanaians to commit to protecting the country’s natural and water resources for the next generation.
According to her, Ghana is well endowed with surface water with 53.2 billion cubic metres of water of which only 14% is being used in the country.
“Out of the 14%, we have 68% for irrigation, 10% for domestic use, 10% for industrial use and the rest is scattered among other uses,” Madam Dapaah told members of the Appointments Committee of Parliament yesterday during a public vetting.
She said, “We have a charge to keep an eye on and a God to glorify. God has given us this essential natural commodity and we have a duty to take care of it.”
“We are secure but we need to preserve it for the next generation,” she stressed and added, “I believe apart from this perennial problem of illegal mining [activity] that introduces contaminants and pollutants into our water, we will have been quite safe, if we had desisted from it when the President made the clarion call.”
“I will use this august House medium to appeal to all of us who do that [galamsey] to stop it,” the minister-designate requested.
NPP Manifesto
On what she would do in the next four years if approved, the nominee indicated that it was the policy of the government, per the New Patriotic Party (NPP) manifesto, to make sure potable water gets to people living in every part of the country whether rural, urban, and peri-urban areas.
“As a minister in charge of water, I have the map of Ghana in my office and it is the policy of the government to make sure that every region, including the new ones, will all have water projects,” the minister-designate disclosed.
She asserted that the government had provided a lot of interventions in improving access to water in the country, saying, “We know the importance of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 of clean water and sanitation to the good people of Ghana. We all know water is the central pillar for most of these SDGs.
“For instance, poverty reduction is one, food security, health, ecosystem. There are seven SFDGs that are directly dependent on water.”
Accra Cleanest City
The nominee, who was in charge of the ministry for the past two years, stated that Accra was on course to become the cleanest city as declared by the President in “absolute terms.”
“I think we are on course, looking at what we started doing and what I continued from my colleague. I believe we all know that cleanliness is an all-inclusive process. It entails a lot of work and we know that when you start a process it takes time to yield results,” Ms. Dapaah indicated.
She noted that the ministry provided bins for littering in the country to stop people from littering the streets and added that 33,000 household toilets were provided under the Ghana Project, intimating “that is also part of the cleanliness process that we have undertaken.”
According to her, there is another project coming on stream to ensure that dam sites are covered, and “most importantly the Odaw River is also worked on,” and added that another project to take care of the vulnerable areas and unplanned settlements “to give them about 5,000 places of convenience and also help in the removal of their waste” is also being worked on.
“Apart from the franchises given by the MMDAs to local contractors to work here, I believe we will see a marked change,” she added.
Water Coverage
On water coverage, the minister nominee said in the year 2019, “we have moved from 62.9% (rural) and 62.52% (urban). We have added 2.7% for rural coverage. For urban coverage, we have added 10.7% and we are still waiting for the result of 2020.
“Mr. Chairman, one thing is that the projects are coming onboard as the population is increasing. So we have come up with a new policy to take care of population growth that we give to these projects, because for instance the Tamale project is geared to the year 2040 to take care of the population growth.
“The new Tamale water project will increase water supply from 45,000 cubic metres to 135,000 cubic metres, and on the sanitation authority, we are proposing and yet to finalise work on it.”
Madam Cecilia Dapaah continued that “we are proposing that there should be a sanitation fund either supplied by Government of Ghana (GoG) or through a sanitation levy so that we will be well equipped financially to take care of the gaps in the financing of sanitation in this country.”
“The contractors have been on the site to do the geological surveys and studies on the Tamale water project. The development phase is going on,” she stated in an answer to a question by the NDC MP for Tamale South, Haruna Iddrisu.
By Ernest Kofi Adu