LOUSY HOME OWNERS: “KEEPING UP APPEARANCES”!

Beautified front yards unsightly, hazardous backyards! That aptly describes about ninety nine and half percent (99.5%) of the properly developed residences in Ghana. I am always baffled to see a person manage to pull resources to acquire land, build a house on it but stops at providing the necessary cleaning facilities that can uphold healthy living conditions and render the structure a home. You pass by a seemingly beautiful house but find liquid waste has collected at the back or the water runs behind neighbours’ backyard, defacing property, polluting the environment and compromising residents’ health. Beauty disappears! One of the hazards of this country is walking behind houses (mfikyire); they are always muddy, smelly and bushy because owners probably are unconscious of the fact that backyard needs to be catered for just as much as front yards. But the situation gets worse.

Some house owners--young and old, lettered and unlettered, male and female—fail to provide places of convenience, creating opportunity for free range defecation, which pollutes the air, and again, compromises residents’ health. Offending owners design every available space within their buildings as living rooms, to the exclusion of washrooms and other living conveniences, forcing tenants to use public places or surrounding lands as places of convenience. Currently, “six million [Ghanaians] practice open defecation because they have no access to toilet facilities” (Six Million, Daily Graphic, April, 30, p.18). The offenders, representing “twenty percent” of the Ghanaian population, apparently do not know the “health implications” of their actions. Can anyone feign ignorance about the impropriety of failure to provide healthy facilities for a house or open defecation--otherwise would offenders usually hide and ease themselves? Whereas such situations might have existed in 510 BC, it is simply unacceptable in the twenty first century AD.

The sad situation--and danger--is that an appreciable number of Ghanaians continue to replicate such unhealthy building patterns. Yet the Assemblies, Town and Country Panning, the Lands Commission, Traditional Heads all watch unconcerned. But most appallingly, people readily rent such structures. Lousy house owners are contemptible but the monitoring agencies that get paid for allowing Ghanaians to be treated so lowly should have been denied all remuneration aeons ago. And tenants who put themselves in such undignified situations deserve to be whacked unendingly!