Clean Ghana Agenda: Unveiling Accra’s shame at Glefe

Robert Ocloo has lived in the Glefe community in the west side of Accra for a little more than 40 years. He was just 25 when he first moved into the community in the late 1980s. He particularly loved the lagoon in the area and it was one of the reasons why he opted to make Glefe his home.

“[The lagoon] was serene, calm and clean,” he says. “Children swam and men fished in it to earn a living. People came from far to enjoy the scenery. Our only problem then was the occasional flooding.”

These days the flooding is more frequent. The damage from flooding is worse than before and almost everyone in the community is affected. When Mr. Ocloo, 60, first moved to Glefe and built his house there, he was careful to build in an area he knew wouldn’t be flooded. But things have changed.

“Everyday water is coming into my room and the tenant’s rooms,” he says.

And it’s all because these boys have chosen to dump garbage in the lagoon. It’s been going on for years but if you talk, these boys will come against you and threaten to kill you.”

The “boys” Mr. Ocloo speaks about are young men who work as household waste collectors, using Chinese made tricycles with carriage buckets.  Most of them don’t live in the Glefe community and much of the garbage they collect isn’t from the community either. But they are always in Glefe, their tricycles forming a long queue heading towards one destination – the lagoon, Mr. Ocloo once fell in love with.

The lagoon has been filled with so much garbage over the years that most aquatic life has been snuffed out of it. No one fishes in it anymore and nobody dares to swim in it. Having taken in so much garbage, large parts of the lagoon look like solid ground – land that can be bought and sold and developed. Many have started building in areas that used to be part of the lagoon and as a result rainwater, which cannot find its natural path into the nearby Atlantic Ocean, is pushed back into homes like Mr Ocloo’s.

He got so frustrated by the situation that he once thought of packing out of the community to go and make a new home elsewhere. 

Mr. Ocloo knows why things have almost gotten out of hand. He believes, unfortunately, there’s little he can do about it.

Paa Willie (not his real name) also a resident of Glefe for close to 25 years lives in constant fear and worry. He fears the community could be hit with a flood it would never be able to recover from.

The recent rains show that if care is not taken, we might experience disaster here at Glefe. Our gutters are unable to flow because of the dumping in the lagoon,” he says.

Apart from the risk of flooding, the pungent odour from the refuse and the thick smoke from burning on the site contribute to persistent and dangerous air pollution.

Paa Willie says the thick smoke from the burning of rubbish and the unpleasant odour negatively impacts the health of the community. He is also particularly worried about the children of school going age who spend their time working on the dumpsite instead of being in school. The community, he adds, has become fertile ground for criminals.

The uncomfortable, insanitary conditions and security concerns in the vicinity has actually forced Paa Willie to leave the area once. But he returned because he couldn’t afford life in his new community.

Everyday, hundreds of tricycle riders line up the streets to the Glefe lagoon to dump tonnes of household waste. This form of garbage collection and disposal has become prevalent in different parts of Accra as the city grapples with an increasing population producing a lot of waste but no structured means of collection and disposal. The tricycles are mostly owned by individuals who operate them as businesses, earning about 50 cedis per collection from each household. Collecting the garbage is easy (every household produces waste) but disposing of it is the hard part – not just for the collectors, but even for the various municipal authorities that make up the city of Accra and contiguous areas.

Micro waste collectors

In Glefe, the tricycle waste collectors decided that the best way to dispose of the garbage was in the lagoon. It is hard to tell where they got the idea from or why nobody stopped them at the start. But many in the community told The Fourth Estate that the practise had been sanctioned by the chief of the area to literally, kill the lagoon and turn it into dry land, that can be sold to earn money.

It is an allegation the chief, Nii Adote I, and his elders deny vehemently – even though it is clear that buildings have been erected on some of the land which has been “reclaimed”. 

Acquah Daniel Quansah, the Spokesperson for the chief claims that the buildings on the reclaimed lands were illegally constructed.

“No chief has sold any land along this lagoon anywhere,” Mr. Quansah told The Fourth Estate. He conceded, however, that those who own these unauthorised developments, do pay some monies to the chief.

“What they pay to get those lands are actually not for buying the land,” he said. “They are royalties for you occupying the place. Once you’re making use of something here, you must surely give [the chiefs] something…No one has a building permit here.”

Mr. Quansah rather blamed the government for the environmental catastrophe that has befallen the Glefe lagoon, saying that if there had been proper policies and programmes in place for waste collection and disposal, no one would have been dumping garbage in the lagoon.  

“Government should lead,” he said. “How much does it cost government to have one bulldozer for the municipality? To create a site for the collection of rubbish, to create a site for solid waste? So that before the community even emerges, human beings grow, population increases, you have those facilities.”

Mr. Quansah claimed that efforts by community and opinion leaders to engage the local government in the area have yielded minimal results. 

But the Coordinating Director of the Ablekuma West Municipal Assembly, Samuel Amoah, says a lot has been done in the past to stop the dumping of garbage in the lagoon. For example, he says military and police personnel were deployed to the shores in the day time to turn the garbage laden tricycles back. However, he said, the garbage merchants snuch in at night, when the security personnel were ostensibly not on guard, to dump waste into the water body.

Mr. Amoah also said the assembly had rolled out other measures including confiscating tricycles from the waste collectors and the imposition of fines. But he said these were not deterrent enough.

Officials of the assembly, he indicated, are regularly met with open hostility and aggression from the youth, who appear to have captured and taken control of the lagoon.

What research says

Senior research fellow at the Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies at the University of Ghana, Dr Ted Nii Yemoh Annang, explains that the Glefe area is a wetland where human settlements should not have been allowed to develop.

Wetlands, he said, function like a natural sponge that stores floodwater, which is then slowly released, in the case of Glefe, into the lagoon with an onward flow into the sea. 

He believes the environmental disaster unfolding in Glefe is as a result of lack of knowledge.

Without education, the appreciation is not there,” he says. “We need to let people understand that this waterbody is not there for nothing.”

Dr Annang warned that the buildings that have been erected on the so-called “reclaimed” lands are structurally deficient and could collapse anytime.

“If you’re using the waste material for filling, in the first case, it’s weak. It takes some time for the materials to harden and become compressed before it can stand the test of time,” he said.

“If you think you put [a building] there and readily it’s available for sale to somebody, I don’t think it’s solid enough to stand any stress. It is not safe. That area is one of the most dangerous earthquake-prone areas in Ghana.”

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