The Tema Ministers Organisation (TMO) has called on the Tema Metropolitan Chief Executive (MCE), Isaac Ashai Odamtten, to intensify education on sanitation to ensure that there is no more littering in the city.

According to the TMO, which is made up of pastors who live and preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ within the Tema Metropolis, people who break the laws should be brought to order or prosecuted for indecent disposal of waste.

The Tema pastors further called on the TMA boss to put in place measures to sanitise the city by encouraging residents to drop their litter or waste into two different litter bins, which would be positioned at vantage points across the Metro.

The pastors explained that one of the bins should be used to collect organic (food) waste, while the other to be used to take care of non-organic (other) waste.

This was contained in a communiqué dubbed “Clean City” to be presented to the Tema Mayor, and announced at a programme organised by the TMO to sensitise residents of the Metropolis about the need for them to stop littering the city, at the forecourt of the TMA.

Before assembling at the forecourt of the TMA, the Tema ministers embarked on a float from the Tema General Hospital through the major streets of the city, picking litter along the stretch to demonstrate their commitment towards their agenda.

All the aspiring parliamentary candidates and Members of Parliament (MPs) of all the political parties in the three constituencies in the Metropolis, namely; Tema East, West and Central, as well as the TMA boss, were invited to the programme, but only the MP for Tema East, Titus Glover, and the MCE, Isaac Ashai Odamtten, turned up.

Addressing participants of the float and other top ranking officials within the Metropolis, Rev David Nagbemedor, President of the TMO, he advised the Assembly that once two different bins have been created, the picking up of these wastes should be done separately and discharged at their designated sites.

“The non-organic waste can be sent to an intermediary warehouse for segregation for onward distribution or processing,” he noted.

He explained further: “In sorting out the non-organic waste, which is said to be 30% of the waste generated by all households, value is made, and will also cut down the waste sent to the landfill; the organic could, as well, be used as compost or fertiliser.”

This, according to him, would help focus resources and collaboration to better respond to the waste management challenges and bring the “Harbour City” to its former glory, where it was regarded as the cleanest city in the whole of West Africa.

The TMO admitted that even though the Assembly has the requisite by-laws on sanitation, it lacked the capacity to enforce those laws, as a result of its limitation, as far as financial and human resources are concerned.

Rev Nagbemedor, who is also the Head Pastor of the Tema Central Assemblies of God Church at Community Four (4), said: “Faced with all these challenges, TMO also recognised that the regulatory by-laws, as well as sanitation and waste management operations, have become too complicated and fragmented.”

He continued: “Once waste generation is an inevitable aspect of life, it becomes a matter of urgent need to observe the process from generation to disposal, in order to determine the areas of critical concern, and tackle them, in order to avoid pollution to a large extent, and also preserve good health.

“The benefits from converting useful resources in our solid waste stream into valuable products are lost when they are dump in landfill sites, which may soon not be available. Value can therefore be generated, if the waste is sorted or segregated at household levels into organic and non-organic.”

The Tema Mayor, Isaac Ashai Odamtten, noted that since cleanliness is next to godliness, residents in Tema must learn to clean their surroundings without getting tired, the same way they have been praying without ceasing.

This, he said, is because just one big clean up exercise, “as has been done today” does not mean the city would be clean forever, saying “it must be a continuous affair to ensure that our city is clean indeed.”

“This is an annual affair; but let us have the reawakening that what we have done today, would be the base standard for us in the coming years, and in the coming year, we should be able to even decentralise and ensure that every community is taking it up, because there is a church in every community in Tema.

“And if there is a church in every community in Tema, then this signal we are sending across must happen in every community in Tema.

“It is important that we clean our city; it is important that we participate in the cleaning exercise, and it is also important that we participate in the National Sanitation Day, which happens on the first Saturday of every month,” the TMA boss observed.

Continuing, he said the Assembly is planning to decentralise the exercise, because it wants the various electoral areas in the Metropolis to own it, because we have responsibility to clean our environment, adding, “We will continue to provide logistics, and even if it is not enough, it must be the base on which all persons can contribute to make Tema better.”

On his part, the MP for Tema East, Titus Glover, said the problem of poor sanitation in the Tema Metropolis is attitudinal, “because people clean their homes, and when they come out and find no dust bins in which they can dump them, they throw them into drains.”

He noted that the most important aspect of this practice is that when they throw it into the drains during the raining season, it tends to block it, and eventually cause flooding in the city.

According to the outspoken New Patriotic Party (NPP) legislator, his biggest worry is that, sometimes, some of the residents throw even human faeces into the drains, and called on Tema residents to desist from the practice.