The leadership of civic sanitation group, The Bus Stop Boys, has urged an aggressive, immediate crackdown on public littering to prevent the catastrophic loss of lives and vital economic zones across the country.
Speaking on Starr FM’s Morning Show, Morning Star on Thursday, May 28, 2026, the founder of the prominent environmental sanitation group, Oheneba Kojo Safo, expressed deep worry over the recurring, devastating floods that have recently submerged major Accra enclaves including Dansoman, Mallam, Kaneshie, Weija, and Awoshie.
With the heaviest part of the rainy season traditionally arriving in June and July, Safo emphasized that the country is running out of time, noting that the current level of destruction is happening dangerously ahead of schedule.
“I believe that until we’re able to unravel the cause, the flooding will continue coming every now and then. And the catch here is that you are not even in June yet. But yet we are seeing some enormous, you know, flooding and all of that. It means that if we don’t uncover the root cause and start dealing with it, we are going to be more—maybe everybody needs a kayak during this June/July at this point,” Safo warned.
He further pitched a community-led surveillance and enforcement strategy which he said can include a structural mechanism that pairs local citizens with state backing to catch offenders in the act and turn sanitation enforcement into a self-funding system.
“If you look at the number of people who are littering on a day, we should have a certain number of people who are also trying to combat them in a way. And I propose that we can have maybe 50 by community. Every community we can raise 50 active volunteers… whose job is to clean and to monitor,” he said.
Safo further demanded a decentralization of the task as part of efforts to ensuring accountability.
“If, for example, Bus Stop Boys is in charge of let’s say Weija community, we are cleaning and monitoring with the state back and we can now record people and send them to the right authorities, they get fined and those monies will be used to, you know, cater for those who are assisting to clean the environment,” he said.
The Bus Stop Boys leader called for aggressive, zero-tolerance financial penalties for local businesses and shop owners who fail to maintain their immediate surroundings, arguing that hitting polluters in their pockets is the quickest way to force a behavioral shift.
“When it comes to sanitation in itself, I think getting money for it, we can just look around us and get the money for it because we can say that ‘clean your frontage, if you don’t and the state cleans, maybe you pay 10 times the charges and your shops will be closed until you pay let’s say the amount that is due.’ If people realize that now they are losing profit for months because they need to pay maybe 10,000 cedis for the state cleaning their frontage, then they themselves will now wake up and begin to do what needs to be done,” he argued.
Source: Starrfm.com.gh
