By Solomon Mensah
Caution: The
content of this article could be nauseating to the reader!
Fighting the stench
In Sunyani, I met a toilet attendant who doubles
as the cleaner in one of the toilets I visited. For the sake of anonymity, I
will call him Papa Asare. Bare handedly, he held a short broom in the right
hand tightly like a relay baton. I gawked at him as he picked the half-worn-out
baskets that had toilet papers in them one after the other and poured the
contents into a bigger basket.
The 52 year old man stamps his right leg on the
piled toilet papers to suppress it from falling from the basket. While I struggled
to take a breath, he did the sweeping seemingly happily without a nose mask. “I
would have wished wearing a nose mask and gloves to work but I have never been
given any,” he told me.
Papa Asare hints that cleaners use DDT and other
chemicals to wash the toilet seats. “These chemicals kill the houseflies and
other animals that are in the toilets,” he noted. However, “It is not all the
time that the caretakers of the toilet supply us the DDT. Therefore, what we often
use is just ordinary water.”
The flies, as I spoke with him, hovered all over.
A user of any of the public toilets performs another function in addition to
easing him/herself. “For the user of the public toilet, he or she has to fan
away the houseflies incessantly,” he admitted.
Another toilet attendant, a woman, whom I will
name as Ama Kwakyewaa, told me that “The Sunyani Municipal Assemblies’ Health
Inspectorate Team occasionally comes to inspect the toilet. But the sad thing
is that when they come, they stand meters away and write their report. It was
on only one occasion that I saw them enter this toilet to inspect,” she said.
Mr. Simon Opoku, the Municipal Environmental
Health Officer-Sunyani, however, debunks the assertion that his men do not
enter the toilets during their inspections. “I enter the male section of the
toilets but not that of the females’ since I am a male,” he said. On the
provision of gloves, nose and mouth masks for the toilet cleaners, he admits
that some of the private operators who partly manage these facilities with the
assembly fail to resource their cleaners with such gears.
He said that the standard of the public toilets
in the Sunyani Municipality is average and that they are not to perfection.
Answering my question as to whether he will use these toilets himself, he gave
a ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ reply. “Yes, if the standard of the toilet is good and vice
versa,” he observed. Attempt to reach the Accra Metropolitan Assembly to as
well react to the standard of public toilets went futile.
Contracting diseases
Dr. Ohene Adu is a private medical doctor in
Sunyani. He tells me there are a number of diseases that one is likely to
contract from the public toilet. “Candidiasis (in women), urinary tract
infection (in both men and women) and diarrhea are some of the diseases one could
contract on an untidy toilet,” he said.
Considering the filthy nature of our public
toilets, a user is prone to contracting any of such diseases.
Public toilet in
the news
On Adom FM’s News (17th August, 2013
and 19th August, 2013 respectively), it was reported that at Aseseso
(Akuapem South) in the Eastern Region, both men and women use the same column
of a public toilet due to malfunction of the female section and at Amasaman in
the Greater Accra Region, a public toilet overflowed. Just close to the
Amasaman’s overflowing toilet, the report said, sat a school and food vendors.
The Foot Soldiers’ factor
The public toilets, unlike the days of old, are
now jointly managed by the various assemblies together with private
individuals. According to Mr. Simon Opoku, the assembly used to advertise to
the general public for interested persons to sign a contract to run the
facility with the assembly.
He, however, said that for the past two to three
regimes (governments), the laid down procedure in getting private individuals
for the joint management of the toilets has changed. “Now, foot soldiers will
seize the toilet and give it to their own men to partner the assembly in the
toilet’s management,” he noted.
Looking beyond the toilet seizures, no decent
word can be used to describe any of the toilets the foot soldiers fight over.
“With the present system of foot soldiers taking captive of the toilets, the assembly
can only query them of the poor state of the toilets but rather cannot take the
‘ownership’ from them,” says Mr. Opoku.
Where does the money go?
Averagely, the public toilet user pays 20 pesewas
to access the toilet. The following table analyzes the income such toilets
owners receive. The table uses two hundred (200) users of a toilet to calculate
its proceeds in a day, month and year. Assuming every user visits the toilet
once in a day.
|
Unit cost
|
Day (1)
|
Week (7)
|
Month (30)
|
Year (12months)
|
|
0.20p
|
200x20
|
40x7
|
280x4wks
|
1120x12
|
|
Total
|
GHc40.00
|
GHc280.00
|
GHc1,120.00
|
GHc13,440.00
|
Proposed
fiscal analysis of sanitary income of a toilet from its 200 people (users).
The million dollar question now to ask is where do
these monies go???
Mr. Simon Opoku says the owners pay 40 to 60 Ghana
Cedis to the assembly in a month. He is hopeful that with the Sunyani Municipal
Assembly’s newly drafted policy to police the private ownership of public
toilets and the effort of his office, cleanliness would be restored to such
toilets. Until then, users of the public toilet like Derrick and Juliet will
have to battle the filth and stench.
The Writer is a Sunyani-based Freelance
Journalist and a Cultural Activist.
Twitter: @Aniwaba
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