Two weeks after renewed emphasis on auditing MCE performance, the city displays a familiar pattern: selective clean-ups, hurried desilting ahead of inspections, and a gradual return to routine once attention shifts. This response is rational. It reflects what audits have been designed to capture.
Audits measure activity. They do not measure transformation.
The prevailing audit lens privileges what can be seen quickly: trucks deployed, exercises conducted, task forces formed, reports filed. These indicators are administratively convenient. They are largely irrelevant to whether the waste system itself is changing.
An MCE can perform well while the same waste reappears in the same locations. The audit records motion; the city records stasis.
This matters because systems respond to measurement.
When audits emphasize inspection-day cleanliness, behavior converges on surface order. When diversion rates, value recovery, and enterprise creation are absent from assessment, those outcomes never emerge. The city learns to perform for visits rather than reorganize flows.
The deeper issue is incentive alignment.
MCEs operate within constrained risk envelopes: fixed budgets, uncertain tenure, and asymmetric political exposure. Under such conditions, visible compliance dominates structural reform. A failed facility creates liability. A fading clean-up leaves no trace.
Audits reinforce this logic.
Absent from most assessments is any accounting of where waste goes after collection. Diversion rates, end-market stability, and integration of informal actors are rarely examined. Waste disappears from policy once it leaves the street.
This omission is consequential.
Without downstream accountability, collection becomes circular: gather, dump, repeat. The audit passes. The system stagnates.
Equally absent is economic continuity. Informal waste activity generates income, but remains invisible to planning. Jobs exist but are uncounted. Value circulates but is untaxed. Knowledge accumulates but is not institutionalized. The audit misreads reality on both sides.
This mismeasurement crowds out entrepreneurship, entrenches emergency interventions, and sustains the illusion of effort without outcome.
None of this requires new laws. It requires new metrics.
If audits tracked diversion rates, verified sales into end markets, and formalized waste employment, behavior would shift rapidly. MCEs would seek partners rather than trucks. Sorting would outrank sweeping. Enterprise zones would matter more than inspection routes.
Cities do not change when watched.
They change when what is watched begins to matter.
*About the Author*
Richard Dablah is a Ghanaian writer and waste entrepreneurship practitioner focused on urban governance, sanitation systems, and the political economy of cities. His work examines how incentives, markets, and institutional design shape municipal outcomes, with particular attention to waste management as economic infrastructure rather than civic hygiene. This journal documents an ongoing diagnostic of Accra’s sanitation system and municipal performance.
