Water, air and cleanness are the chief articles in my pharmacy.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Let everyone clean in front of his own door and the whole world will be clean.
Johann Wolfgang Van Goethe
Where is the culture of cleanliness?
Lailah Gifty Akita
FRANCIS BACON in ‘Advancement of Learning’ wrote: “Cleanliness of the body was ever deemed to process from a due reverence to God.” Two centuries later, (1791), John Wesley preached a sermon: “Slovenness is no part of religion. Cleanliness is indeed next to Godliness.” This expression has its roots in Hebrew literature. The Israelites insisted on ‘cleanliness’ and separated ‘clean’ from ‘unclean’ things: dead bodies and carcasses, leprosy and bodily discharges. Of course, in the good Old Book, Jesus insisted that godliness is not attained by what we eat or do not eat or by how often we wash our hands, but by…?
In school, we were taught ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ at the Hygiene class, and this proverb was explained to us about how cleanliness was important in human life and that it had connection with the spiritual growth and purity of the body, mind and soul. We were also taught at Civics class: “Spare the rod, spoil the child” a misrepresentation of Proverbs 22:15: “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child. The rod of discipline will drive it far from him.” OR Proverbs 13:24: “Whoever spares the rod, hates his son, but he who loves him, is diligent to discipline him.”
Some of us grew up in villages which were kept clean by weekly communal work – and woe betide the one who deliberately refused to join in the routine weekly communal labour-sweeping the community toilet, weeding the vicinity of the village, or helping a neighbor who has suffered one calamity or another. What do we see nowadays? Filth, filth, filth: urban filth. Someone asks a rhetorical question: “Are Ghanaians dirty by nature?”
In ‘Let’s change mindset on sanitation’ a newspaper editorial wrote: “A walk through the streets of the major cities in the country will show an overwhelming state of filth that has engulfed the country… The situation is even worse when one visits the coastal cities. In addition to garbage that households generate which is not properly managed, many households do not have toilets and those who live by the beaches turn our sandy beaches into places of convenience, a spectacle that turns away many a tourist and deprives the country of revenue that would have accrued from tourism.”
And true, true, Linda Schindler, a foreign tourist commented: “I visited Ghana last summer and indeed the beaches are horrible… we were eating at a nice open air restaurant in Cape Coast only to have a several young men walk to the front of the restaurant, drop their pants, and shit in front of us. Men urinate everywhere. There was no garbage system in Accra or anywhere else and the garbage was dumped right on the street. Getting used to the stench was really hard… I wonder how people survive in this filth!”
In April, 2017, President Nana Akufo Addo must have been “dreaming big” when on receiving a chieftaincy title from the chiefs and people of James Town, he declared: “The commitment we are making… is that by the time we end our four-year term, Accra is going to be the cleanest city in Africa.” So Nii Kwaku Ablade Okudzeaman I (the Royal Warrior who champions the welfare of his people) had so sworn before Oblempong Nii Kojo Ababio, the Paramount Chief of Ngleshi Alata Traditional Area.
The said editorial is captured again: “When President Akufo – Addo announced his determination to ensure that Accra becomes the cleanest city in Africa and appointed a minister in charge of sanitation, many heaved a sigh of relief. But it appears that one year on, not much has been achieved.” You may say it is an arduous task, you may not be far from correct, but he is a determined President, so let us see his magic working.
When the Cholera outbreak in London (Soho) occurred in 1854, Physician John Snow was able to trace it to the unsanitary slum where centuries – old cesspits were situated close to wells that provided drinking water to a crowded populace. With the death of as many as10,000, people began to flee the city, just as they had fled during the Bubonic Plague of 1666. Just around the same time in Ghana, we had very clean villages and mythical sanctions to deter people from polluting our water bodies: sanctions like not defecating close to rivers; not fetching water on sacred days; not felling trees nor farming around rivers—and infractions to all these carried many heavy fines, not excluding banishment.
What do people do these days? Throwing garbage into running water: faeces, plastic waste, car tyres (and incredibly) refrigerators—ask those whose houses are located downstream. The gutters get choked especially with the onset of rain. The Ministry of Tourism too has a task – clean the beaches; do not allow ‘free range’ shitting or ‘she-petee’. Let the Ministry adopt effective measures to stop these acts instead of lamenting and saying: “It is very sickening to see people dump waste in open drains and water ways without thinking about the consequences.”
No wonder, a Catholic priest is recommending the banning of plastic goods: sachets, drinking water bottles and the like. Will the ban succeed here as it has succeeded elsewhere? Where are all the graduates of ‘Environmental Science’ from our universities?’ Are they all switching to other fields because the system cannot absorb them? Should it be a task for the Regional and District Assemblies alone? And the Omanhene of Nsein Traditional area calls for the re-introduction of the Sanitary Inspectors called the ‘nsaman-nsaman’—a job for the graduates in ‘Environmental Science’? The National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO) may have to take a good look at its mandate again: is it only for ‘disaster management’ and ‘relief’ alone? NADMO may have played a vital role in the Melcom Building Disaster at Achimota of November 2012 and the Circle Flood and Fire Disaster of 2015. By the new NADMO Act of 2016 (Act 927), the NADMO is enjoined to be proactive, not reactive to “prevent the occurrence of disasters as well as mitigate the impact of disasters by undertaking risk reduction initiatives.” Well said, and let us hope that personnel in the outfit will heed the call, and not wait for disasters to happen and take credit for distributing ‘relief items’.
The Roman poet, Juvenal in ‘Satire X’ noted: “Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano” (A man should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body). AND James Allen in ‘As a Man Thinketh’ writes: “We are what we think we are. If our mind has evil thoughts, we will suffer pain; if our thoughts are pure, joy will follow…we are made or unmade by ourselves. By our thoughts we forge the weapon by which we can destroy ourselves…”
Africanus Owusu – Ansah
africanusoa@gmail.com