By _Richard DABLAH_
Email: richard.dablah@gmai.com
A year has passed since the oath. The ceremony had its cameras and its rhetoric (a public reset was promised), and the president’s instruction to hold metropolitan and municipal chief executives accountable for Accra’s filth was welcome and necessary . The question now is not whether the instruction was bold. The question is whether it was specific enough to change incentives or whether it will dissolve into another cycle of clean-ups and headlines.
Let us be plain: Accra is an urban balance sheet with a missing asset class. The city produces roughly 2,000 tonnes of solid waste each day; much of that stream passes through markets, shorelines, gutters, and informal hands without ever becoming an owned, priced input . The failure is not a failure of people; it is a failure of institutional design. When value has no buyer, behaviour follows the price signal (and the price has been zero).
The macro cost is not small. Studies stretching back a decade-plus have placed the country’s losses from poor sanitation in the low hundreds of millions of dollars annually. That figure is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the arithmetic of collapsed productivity, avoidable health expenditures, lost trading days, and the insurance premium that investors add when a city openly tolerates disorder . If the presidency is serious about converting rhetoric into revenue, the next move must be surgical: change what counts as success for an MCE.
**Three analytical truths must anchor any honest reset.**
First : Audits are necessary but not sufficient. Audits reveal shortfalls; they do not alter payoffs. An MCE who loses an audit but keeps the same budget and the same incentives has no reason to change behaviour beyond cosmetic compliance. The principal–agent problem here is prosaic but crippling: Central government principals ask local agents to deliver outcomes without shifting the local reward structure. Fix the principal–agent link, and the city will behave differently.
Second: The sanitation problem is a supply-chain problem, not merely a publicity problem. The flows are daily and predictable: plastics, organics, ash, textiles, electronics. Each stream has a use if captured, processed, and routed into a market. The policy failure has been to treat these flows as waste rather than as raw material. A municipal system that prizes tonnage moved to dumpsites above tonnage converted into value is structurally perverse.
Third: Formalisation is a distributional instrument. The people who collect, sort, and reroute waste already do so in vast numbers. Formalising them (through cooperatives, micro-equity, and pay-per-tonne contracts) is not merely a matter of dignity; it is how the city captures taxable income, reduces corruption at points of transfer, and converts survival occupations into enterprises. The political economy of reform requires that those who lose from the old arrangement be compensated with stakes in the new one.
If your administration means to wield its second year as a reform instrument, move the MCEs: but do so by changing what MCE success looks like. I propose four operational redefinitions, each simple, measurable, and politically legible.
•Replace activity measures with outcome metrics. Swap “how many trucks were deployed” for “percentage of waste diverted from landfill,” “volume of compost sold,” and “share of plastics converted into usable products.” Publicise these metrics monthly. Make them hard and comparable.
•Convert conditional finance into a blunt instrument of change. Tie a meaningful tranche of district sanitation transfers to the metrics above. Reward the top quartile with increased capital for innovation; withhold funds from the bottom quartile until performance improves. Not as punishment for politics, but as a calibration of public money to public value.
•Create three city-level “waste enterprise zones” with time-limited privileges: fast permits, conditional land access, and guaranteed offtake contracts for validated products (compost for municipal landscaping, recycled aggregate for public works). Jamestown, Adabraka, and a third processing cluster in the industrial belt will do as pilots. Let the market compete inside the zones; let the state enforce standards and guarantee initial demand.
▪︎Seed a small, ring-fenced Waste Entrepreneurship Fund (modest capital, but catalytic) to underwrite early capital costs: shredders, pelletisers, small pyrolysis units, and composting infrastructure. Use blended instruments: partial grants, repayable technical loans, and performance bonuses. Require co-investment from private partners to ensure financial discipline.
These are technical prescriptions, but they carry political logic. They make the job of an MCE measurable, fundable, and defensible. They transform an accountability ritual into a results architecture.
Anticipate the objections. Critics will say this is privatisation. That objection confuses ownership with governance. The state’s aim should be to create plural, competitive suppliers of waste transformation services, not to hand monopolies to cronies. Where the state guarantees offtake and protects the public health common good, private firms must still earn profit by serving customers (whether the customer is a market, a construction project, or a municipal tender for recycled materials). Second, critics will say this is technocratic. Well, yes. The alternative is political theatre: ceremonials of empty clean-ups that cost money and produce no durable outcomes.
*Practicalities* : Measurement must be simple. A public dashboard with three indicators per ward (collection coverage, diversion rate, and verified jobs formalised) will be more powerful than a hundred glossy reports. Verification can be immediate: weighbridges for bales, QR receipts for registered collectors, and satellite imagery for illegal dump reductions. Use modest technology; the barrier is political, not technical.
Finally, the timeline must be audaciously short. Within 90 days after a presidential sign-off, the state should have: (a) published the performance framework; (b) seeded the fund with a visible tranche; (c) authorised the first enterprise zone; and (d) announced the pilot partners. Failure to show movement within these windows will allow the window of political attention to narrow and relegate reform to next year’s promises.
A city is not only bricks and bridges; it is the coordination that holds daily life. The presidency has the authority to change coordination. The one-year mark is a moment to convert an instruction into architecture. Move the MCEs, not with more audits, but with a redesign of incentives and a market logic that makes cleanliness profitable. Do that, and Accra’s drains will clear because actors find it in their interest to clear them. Fail to do it, and the cycle of spectacle will continue: clean-ups that wobble, disasters that panic, and the same political theatre replayed.
Action, not rhetoric. Make the sanitation instruction matter by changing the metrics that govern municipal behaviour. Make waste pay its way into the city’s balance sheet. Then judge the MCEs not by the number of speeches they give, but by the tonnes of value they recover.
_Acta, non verba_ .
