Clean-up campaigns in Accra do not fail because they are poorly executed. They persist because they succeed at something other than cleanliness.
They succeed politically.
Each campaign follows a familiar structure. An announcement is made. Officials appear on site. Media coverage documents the effort. Waste is removed from select corridors. For a brief period, the city looks responsive. The intervention ends. The system resets.
This repetition is not accidental. It reflects the incentives embedded in public action.
Clean-ups are low-risk instruments. They are visible, fast, and reversible. They require no institutional reconfiguration, no confrontation with procurement rules, and no redistribution of control. They can be initiated quickly and abandoned quietly. For municipal leadership operating under uncertainty, this makes them attractive.
They are governance without commitment.
From a political standpoint, clean-ups offer three advantages. First, they generate images. Second, they create a sense of urgency without demanding permanence. Third, they allow responsibility to be framed as behavioral rather than structural. The city is dirty because residents misbehave; therefore, the solution is discipline and mobilization.
This framing is convenient. It absolves systems.
If waste returns after a clean-up, the explanation is ready-made: enforcement lapsed, citizens relapsed, and the rains intervened. No audit needs to ask whether the waste had an alternative destination, a buyer, or a price.
Clean-ups thrive where outcomes are difficult to measure.
Unlike diversion rates or value recovery, cleanliness is subjective and temporary. It can be assessed visually and immediately. This makes it ideal for short political cycles. A clean street today satisfies the inspection. What happens next month is someone else’s problem.
The persistence of clean-ups, therefore, reveals a deeper truth: the state prefers interventions whose failure cannot be conclusively proven.
Structural reforms, by contrast, are measurable. A recycling facility either operates or it does not. A procurement reform either generates demand or it does not. Formalization either increases recorded employment or it does not. These outcomes are harder to obscure and slower to deliver. They carry reputational risk.
In such an environment, spectacle outperforms systems.
There is also an economic dimension. Clean-ups absorb budget recurrently without altering flows. They are compatible with existing contracts, existing vendors, and existing administrative routines. Systemic reform disrupts all three.
This compatibility explains endurance. The city does not lack ideas; it lacks reasons to abandon what is politically safe.
The result is a cycle of performative responsiveness. Waste is removed, not reorganized. Attention is managed, not outcomes. The city learns how to look clean rather than how to stay functional.
Breaking this cycle requires more than better campaigns. It requires altering what success looks like.
As long as cleanliness is treated as an event rather than a condition, clean-ups will remain the default tool. As long as audits reward activity over transformation, spectacle will prevail. As long as procurement buys against recycling, waste will return.
Clean-ups persist because they fit the existing system.
Systems change only when they are made uncomfortable.
Until then, Accra will continue mistaking motion for progress — and mistaking visibility for control.
*About the Author*
Richard Dablah is a Ghanaian 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.
