A couple of days ago a nude man sat close to the Nima Police Station. Beneath the Tackie Tawiah Overpass also nearby the location offers an abode for many persons showing signs of mental health.
The part of the overpass towards Kanda Estates has been secured with barbed wire and jutting white rocks to stop other mentally impaired persons from using the place as an abode as they have been doing for a while now.
The picture presented above is not restricted to this part of the nation’s capital only. Other parts of the city show similar features. The Nkrumah Circle area contains many more of this category of persons some of them narcotic drug damaged persons otherwise called Junkies.
It would appear that there are no arrangements to capture such persons and send them to psychiatric facilities in the city or elsewhere where they can be saved from the claws of such substances. We can easily point at budgetary or logistical constraints something the head of the Ghana Mental Health Authority has alluded to many times. It could also be attributed to indifference on the part of public officers whose duty it is to ensure that such persons do not roam the streets the way they do.
We do not want a situation where tourists would leave the country with the picture of a city littered with mental health patients or junkies.
At a time when we want to derive maximum dividends from tourism, our streets should not only be neat but be bereft of mental patients and junkies taking over especially our ceremonial streets.
The cleaning of our frontages so that the nation’s capital can live up to the billing of a neat city would be compromised when we do not tackle this eyesore.
With some of such persons unpredictable it would not be surprising when one day one of them attacks passersby.
Under the Overpass at Circle efforts have been made to stop the junkies and destitute from sleeping under the bridge. The jutting rocks to achieve this notwithstanding, the junkies place cardboards or even ply woods on them to provide comfort.
The financial challenges notwithstanding the authorities especially the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) and related agencies must join forces in addressing the challenge posed by the roaming patients and substance abuse persons.
The Public Relations Officer of the AMA has reportedly said that the newly appointed MCE of Accra would address the issue next week. It is our expectation that she would announce plans to evacuate the patients from the streets of the city.
Unfortunately such an evacuation, if that is the case at all, would leave us with another challenge. The many Niger nationals with their kids begging for alms on the ceremonial streets of Accra and leaving at the end of each day mounds of garbage now constitute a fresh eyesore for Accra.