World Toilet Day Awards: Why Ghana remains a Sh*thole Country till Further Notice
The swearing in of the highest position in Ghana, the presidency, usually comes along with other five-hundred unwarranted public toilets takeovers across the country. According to a report by a Water and Sanitation expert, Ing. Harold Esseku of the World Bank in 2016, about 8 million Ghanaians pay GHS 0.50p daily to use public toilets.The youth claim once their political party is in power, they have the right to run the public toilet business in their community.
Toilets facilities are essential to living comfortably under the sun. However, over eighty-five percent of households in Ghana do not have access to safe and hygienic toilet systems. Many relationships ended prematurely because one partner failed to invite the other home in the quest to keep poor sanitation at home private.
While the rich are extending internet service to the washroom to answer nature’s call, the poor is losing their bargaining power to stressed anal sphincters—the routine queue, coins and polybags story. Unfortunately, Ghanaians have a miscued prioritization logarithm where we put pressure on government for post-disaster management strategies while the lead cause of death stares gleefully in our faces.
Residents waiting for their turn to use a public toilet Credit: Graphic Online
We don’t adhere to personal hygiene standards yet we put the government under pressure for more hospital beds. Who needs hospitals when quality air, water and food are generously served by the environment? Hold up your argument mate! Accidents occur because of poor adherence to road safety standards as well.
The main contributors to alarming sanitation problems in Ghana is poor community layout and water scarcity problems. You can only have a convenient toilet if you have space to download your sh*t and water to format your sh*t-card. Without these strands of hope, you will always rue wake up calls.
The human body is designed to convert food into simple molecules that can be assimilated by specialized organs to give energy. Unlike engine-driven automobile that produce harmful by-products, the digestive system in humans converts excreta into high energy organic matter that can be used to grow crops (primary producers) and generate biogas—a renewable energy source.
Having a toilet facility at home, school or workplace improves the psychosocial being of an individual and should not be treated like sh*t. People who have a toilet installed at home eat healthier meals and suffer less sleep disorders. If you’re eating more and pooping less, feces become hardened and impacted causing the bowel to rapture. Again, constantly suppressing the need to poop alters bowel motility and causes an individual to possibly resort to laxatives to stimulate colon function.
Economic hardship in the country has caused many people to relocate to settlements with substandard sanitary conditions. Surprisingly, one-in-five schools in Ghana do not have toilet facilities at all. This issue becomes more daunting in the case of menstrual hygiene, where school girls do not have a decent place to sanitize themselves.
Why claim democratic if our regulatory agencies can not protect democracy of the Poo-ple? Janitors who lie at risk of contracting diseases are the least respected and remunerated members of society. Our school children have limited access to toilet facilities and affordable sanitary materials. We have failed as a
country in providing basic needs for the society; from eating contaminated food, drinking polluted water and inhaling poisoned air. The youth have also abandoned the creativity and nature-based solutions that sailed our forefathers from ancient days. We’d rather borrow data bundles to troll a cohort while standing in-line to use the public toilet. That’s a sh*thole generation of a sh*thole country. Birds have to fly, fish gotta swim and colons gotta poop!
The next time you fish for affordable housing in highly populated cities like Accra, Kumasi and Takoradi, remember having a place to poo supersedes every bargain.
Shall we rely on government to provide our basic toilet needs?
Are we losing focus as citizens?
Do you really understand what drives longevity?
Let's plant for food today and pray for properly manage toilets when the sun starts rising from the west tomorrow.
Save your sh*ting data bundles for tomorrow because the next time nature calls...it'll definitely be a video call over 4G fibre optic cable.
Always remember to wash your hands with soap and clean water after using the loo.
Happy World Toilet Day!!
Evans Agyei Ntiamoah
Environmental Quality Analyst
Ghana Environmental Community