The Member of Parliament for Bekwai and Deputy Ranking Member on Parliament’s Committee on Sanitation and Water Resources, Ralph Poku-Adusei, has criticised government’s newly announced two-day national cleanup exercise, describing it as a knee-jerk reaction that will not solve Ghana’s underlying sanitation crisis and amounts to a waste of taxpayer money.
Speaking on Citi FM’s Eyewitness News on Tuesday, July 7, 2026, the Bekwai lawmaker argued that President John Dramani Mahama’s declaration of Friday, July 10, and Saturday, July 11, as National General Cleaning Day in the wake of the devastating June 29 floods that claimed about 13 lives and destroyed more than 7,000 households was addressing symptoms rather than the root causes of the country’s waste management failures.
According to Poku-Adusei, the government’s decision to mobilise citizens, ministers, MPs and MMDCEs for a two-day cleanup, rather than resourcing the Environmental Service Providers Association (ESPA) to carry out their routine work, reflects a populist rather than a practical approach to the crisis. He questioned what a two-day exercise could realistically achieve when waste is generated continuously across the country every day of the year.
“Let us shift away from the populist approach and come to the key issues that need to be addressed,” he said, adding that government should instead be channelling funds directly to the institutions responsible for managing waste on a sustained basis.
The MP pointed to his own Bekwai constituency as an example, noting that despite seven or eight cleanup exercises having already been carried out by the Municipal Chief Executive, the level of filth in the area remained unbearable. He argued this demonstrated that periodic cleanup exercises, without addressing funding and infrastructure gaps, produce no lasting results.
Poku-Adusei also took aim at the Greater Accra Regional Minister, whom he accused of failing to act despite Accra generating an estimated 4,000 tonnes of waste daily from a population of four to five million people. He described the situation as having moved beyond a management challenge into a full-blown national security threat, warning that inaction could have dire consequences for residents of the capital.
He called on government to move beyond declarations aimed at media visibility and instead take concrete decisions, including renewing the expired waste management service agreement with ESPA and identifying proper landfill sites, to arrest the country’s worsening sanitation canker.