The Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA) is at the final stage of the processes to gazette its sanitation bye-laws.

Mr Osei Assibey-Antwi, the Metropolitan Chief Executive (MCE), said the Assembly’s Waste Management Department was playing a lead role to finally get the bye-laws duly recognised.

The aim, he said, was to deal promptly with sanitation-related offences, to engender a cleaner environment for the wellbeing of the people.

KMA had prosecuted 250 sanitation-related cases since the advent of the project dubbed ‘Environmental Sanitation Enforcement Drive’, which aimed to name, shame and prosecute culprits of sanitation-related offences.

Mr Assibey-Antwi, who was addressing the first ordinary meeting of the first session of the Eighth Assembly, said the prosecutions yielded GH¢90,000, which had since been paid into the Consolidated Fund of the Central Government.

The Assembly, he said, had established a Food Hygiene Unit with the intent to screen and certify food vendors for the safety of the public.

So far, over 11, 179 food vendors had gone through the process, according to the MCE, explaining that the Unit was expected to do monitoring, supervision, education and enforcement to create the needed awareness on food safety.

On the ‘Compound Sanitation Project’, he indicated that the idea was to increase household toilets within the metropolis by assisting those without toilets to acquire some.

Over five hundred toilets had for some time now, he noted, been constructed for the benefit of over 3, 700 persons.

“This has indeed reduced open defecation in the metropolis”, he told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in an interview, on the sidelines of the programme.