The Chief Executive of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA), Mohammed Adjei Sowah, has described the sanitation minister’s claim of improved sanitation in Accra as true.

The AMA boss jumped to the minister’s defence as a result of a cross section of Ghanaians calling her out for lying about Accra’s sanitation situation.

Answering questions in Parliament last week, the Minister for Sanitation and Water Resources, Cecilia Dapaah said Accra is generally clean, despite government’s inability to fulfil the promise of making it the cleanest city in Africa by 2020.

In support of this, Mr. Adjei Sowah, on the Citi Breakfast Show on Wednesday, March 11, 2020, outlined some measures that have been put in place to ensure cleanliness in Accra.

“The Sanitation Minister was right when she said that despite the improvement in the sanitation, we are not there yet. And that is a fact. So, to re-echo the position of the Minister, indeed we’ve made progress but we are not there yet. We have made progress in the sense that we are providing bins to people in terms of infrastructure that have come up in Accra to be able to collect waste. We have waste transfer stations in Accra. We have close to 1000 waste that are being recycled and turned into all kinds of things.”

“Plastic recycling is our big thing now. We are trying to get the right model for the collection of plastics and to recycle it. As a result of the economy of the metal waste that we have, you have a bunch of people that go round to collect metal waste. They process it and make money out of it. You can hardly find metal in our waste stream. It is the same model we are trying to apply on plastics. We are trying to get the right value for plastics and make an economy out of it,” he said.

Background

President Nana Akufo-Addo in April 2017 promised to make Accra the cleanest city in Africa by the end of his tenure in office.

Although this was later revised by the Sanitation Ministry to the end of his second term should he be voted for in the upcoming general elections, Mr. Adjei Sowah still insists that the government is on course in making Accra the cleanest city in Africa.