It’s over. For one day, Ghana looked decent. Gutters were open. Streets were swept. The plastics that have been rotting in our drains for years were finally bagged and taken away. For one day, the land had sanity.
But let’s be honest with ourselves. Will it last? No. Because the problem has never been the rubbish. The problem is us. The problem is the mind.
You can bring 10,000 Zoomlion workers. You can buy new trucks. You can declare National Sanitation Day every first Saturday. But if the Ghanaian mind is still dark, then we are just washing the floor while the tap is still running.
Tomorrow morning it will start again. A sachet of water tossed from a trotro window. A shopkeeper sweeping trash straight into the gutter. A contractor dumping sand and chippings into a drain because “it’s just for today.” And then the rains will come.
The rain doesn’t beg. It comes, and it exposes us. The same gutters we cleared will choke. The same communities we took pictures in will be under water. TVs will show sad faces and anchors will call it a “natural disaster.” There’s nothing natural about it. We did this to ourselves.
And we should not pretend this is new.
Back in 1978, a former Head of State and military leader, Gen. I.K. Acheampong, said something we should all ponder on today:
“I can go today and the SMC Government can go, but the problems of the nation will still remain, unless the people as a whole change from their greed, avarice and other social evils that afflict us.”
48 years later, read that again. He wasn’t talking about politics alone. He was talking about character. About us.
Greed makes us dump where we shouldn’t. Avarice makes us build in waterways and wait for compensation. And the social evil of “it’s not my job” is what keeps Ghana dirty.
We want government to do everything. Clean the streets, pick the trash, punish the offenders. But we take zero responsibility for our own compound. Our own street. Our own behavior.
Look at the demolitions. Bulldozers come, pull down houses built in waterways, and we clap. “Government is working.” Six months later, someone is pouring a new foundation in that same waterway. Why? Because “if I don’t build there, someone else will.” Because “government will demolish and maybe even pay me.” That is not hustle. That is sabotage. We are sabotaging our own future.
Sanitation is not a government project. It is a citizenship project. No law can make you clean. No task force can follow you to the gutter. It starts at home. It starts when you teach your child not to throw trash on the ground. It starts when you refuse to join the midnight dumping. It starts when you walk 5 minutes to find a bin instead of dropping it “just here.”
Big Dawood of Let Love Lead NGO said it today: “It is time to clean Ghana. It is time to make our city very beautiful.” He’s right. But beauty without discipline is like makeup on a corpse. It looks good for the cameras, then it starts to rot.
Yes, government must do its part. Provide bins. Enforce the laws. Jail people who build in waterways. Fund the NGOs doing the real work. But government cannot stand in your bedroom and tell you not to litter.
The land was forced to be sane today. The question is: have we forced our minds to be sane too? If not, then this was all theater. Expensive, well-meaning, televised theater. And when the next rain falls, it will wash the stage away.
Ghana does not need another sanitation day. Ghana needs a sanitation mind.
Until then, we will keep sweeping. We will keep flooding. We will keep demolishing. And we will keep pretending. And Ghana will never truly be clean.
