By Richard Dablah
Email: richard.dablah@gmail.com
Passing through Abeka recently, I paused to watch a scene that should unsettle any
economist, policymaker, or everyday observer who cares to look beyond the surface. A
small band of young men—the Buzzstop Boyz—stood ankle-deep in sludge, pulling
plastic and silt from a choked drain. Their branded shirts marked them not as paid
contractors, but as self-organized citizens trying to do for free what the market has
failed to do at any price.
In that moment, the drain itself became a ledger, an unbalanced account of how we
misprice risk and undervalue the capital that matters most—our natural systems and the
communities that hold them together. The Buzzstop Boyz are more than sanitation
workers; they are stopgap insurers for an economic system that does not bother to price
its externalities. They clear the water’s path today so we do not drown tomorrow, yet
their labor—like the drains they unclog—remains invisible on any balance sheet.
This is our prevailing model: reactive, piecemeal, short-term. Municipal services limp
behind mounting waste volumes, managing environmental liability as if our lands and
waterways were expendable write-offs. We treat waste as a nuisance to be hidden, not
a cost to be confronted or an opportunity to be mined for value. Every discarded sachet
of water packet is a micro-debt. Each tin can tossed in a gutter is an IOU the community
will repay in flooded streets, mosquito-borne disease, and lost property value.
At its core, this is a textbook case of distorted incentives. The convenience of
disposables is privatized profit; the cost of disposal is a public burden. No price signal
alerts the sachet producer or the plastic straw user to the real downstream cost of that
fleeting convenience. The market is blind where it should see most clearly.
What if we flipped this script? What if we viewed that drain not just as an eyesore to be
cleaned but as a dashboard warning of capital misallocation? What if we treated clean
drains, unpolluted water, and healthy neighborhoods not as accidental benefits but as
critical infrastructure worth investing in and safeguarding?
This new model would rest on three urgent shifts:
1. True Valuation and Economic Literacy:
We must start with honest accounting. Littering is not just a civic failing—it is a
mispricing of our collective assets. Communities need more than slogans about keeping
Ghana clean; they need to grasp that blocked drains erode property values, pollute
water sources, and inflate healthcare costs. A drain is not a dumping ground—it is part
of the plumbing that sustains local economies.
2. Skills as Civic Infrastructure:
The Buzzstop Boyz represent an underutilized asset. They have sweat equity, local
knowledge, and social capital. But they remain stuck at the bottom rung of the waste
chain—reactive, unpaid, and under-resourced. Imagine the same young men, trained as
resource recovery entrepreneurs, composting organic waste into fertilizer, sorting
recyclables for local manufacturers, and converting waste streams into cash streams.
Waste becomes raw material. Cleanup becomes an enterprise. Civic pride becomes
decent jobs.
3. Innovation and Aligned Incentives:
The real fix is upstream. We need instruments that shift behavior before the drain fills.
Deposit-return schemes that reward consumers for returning plastics. Producer
responsibility laws that force manufacturers to reclaim what they produce. Incentives for
biodegradable packaging. Tax breaks for circular businesses. The goal is simple: make
waste expensive to generate and lucrative to prevent.
The Buzzstop Boyz, standing knee-deep in a gutter, are telling us something. They
demonstrate that community goodwill exists, but goodwill alone is insufficient for a
sustainable policy. Without a market that rewards prevention, we will always be paying
interest on yesterday’s waste. The drains will clog again. The volunteers will tire. The
cycle will repeat.
Our real work must move upstream. Our capital must follow. If we get the economics
right—pricing risk, rewarding prevention, valuing community effort—we will not need
heroes with shovels in choked gutters. We will have designed a system where those
drains stay clear because the true cost of choking them has finally come due.