AMA forms mobile unit to enforce bye-law on environmental cleanliness

By Edmund Smith-Asante

Mr Anthony Mensah, Waste Management Director of the AMA (middle) in a chat with Mr Smith-Asante (left). With them is the Operations Manager of Zoomlion Domestic Services, Mr Husein Suadiq

A unit to enforce a bye-law of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA), which requires households and institutions to keep their immediate surroundings clean at all times, began operation last Saturday.


The mobile unit has been charged to, especially, challenge households and institutions sited along streets to keep their frontages clean at all times, failure of which would attract summons to court or a fine or prison term in default.

The bye law takes its power from paragraphs (1) and (18) of Section 296 of the 1960 Criminal Code.
This was disclosed to the Daily Graphic by the Waste Management Director of the AMA, Mr Anthony Mensah, during a clean-up exercise at Abossey Okai in the Ablekuma Sub-Metropolitan Area to mark the National Sanitation Day (NSD) exercise last Saturday.

The clean-up, which took place in the spare parts area, was supported by Zoomlion Domestic Services with sanitation equipment and personnel.

“The task force, which is going to go round to impress upon people to comply with the provisions in the bye laws, have started. They are currently operating along the Independence Avenue from Ridge Roundabout to the Tetteh Quarshie Interchange.”

Bye-law
Mr Mensah said the bye law stipulates that “when your house is close to the main road, you are supposed to keep the space from the front of your house to the middle of the road clean, but so far people have not been responding positively to this.”

“So we have formed a mobile task force, which eventually will culminate into a unit that will be situated within the waste management department.  They will confront house occupants and house owners and challenge them to keep the frontage of their houses clean. If they fail to do that then we will summon them and take them to court,” he added.

He said the AMA would enforce the bye law to make sure that people became conscious and also developed the discipline to help keep the environment clean.

Mr Mensah added that AMA was in the process of reviewing its existing bye-laws because certain aspects were missing and people were exploiting those loopholes.

“But even before we are done with the review we are still enforcing what is in place to make sure people comply with the provisions in the bye laws,” he stated.  

Institutions
Mr Mensah indicated that the terms of reference for the task force was not limited to households but institutions and hawkers at major intersections and traffic lights as well.

He said the AMA was going to continue with other means of communication such as radio announcements and the deployment of public address systems mounted on vans across the city of Accra to sensitise the public to be conscious of keeping the environment clean.

Writer’s email: edmund.asante@graphic.com.gh

This story was first published by graphiconline.com on May 12, 2016