Cleanliness is next to Godliness

The decision by the management of Zoom Lion to set up a subsidiary company called Zoil Ghana Limited with the main objective of keeping our coastlines clean is a laudable plan that must be supported by stakeholders.

We are told the project is expected to employ about 10,000 Ghanaians, especially those living in the Western, Central, Greater Accra and Volta Regions, who will be engaged in the cleaning and monitoring of Ghana’s beaches. The project was dully launched last week at Esiama and Ellembelle in the Western Region.

In fact our inability to attract more tourists to our country borders on our collective failure to clean up our beaches.

A trip through the coastlines starting from Chorkor, La, Teshie, Keta and back to Anomabo, Mankessim, Cape Coast and Elmina etc will reveal how unfriendly and negligent we have been to our beaches.

It is common to see adults of both sexes openly defecating hand in hand at beaches, while women and children in particular have made it a daily chore of dumping refuse at the beaches without any sense of shame.

Thus, while countries like Senegal and Gambia with less slave monuments are attracting more tourists Ghana is only deluding herself as a preferred destination in Africa.

By UNWTO statistics, Ghana’s visitor numbers continue to grow, but the growth is not up to the country’s full potential. This could be attributed to the fact that Ghana remains a high cost destination and the cost of doing business in Ghana remains high. Besides, our beaches are simply too dirty.

Tourism, like other areas we have competitive advantage in, but have failed to develop, is a huge revenue source that is waiting to be tapped. But why will any tourist come to Ghana when we cannot meet one of the essential catalysts -environmental cleanliness.

That explains why this newspaper is impressed by the feat Zoom Lion has achieved in waste management and related problems that defied solution in the past.

It is even on record that the company is ahead with plans to export its waste management concept to neighbouring countries and has put in a bid to take up waste management at the Angola 2010 CAF tournament.

While other Ghanaian companies have failed to expand beyond Accra, Zoom Lion is perhaps, the only company that is making efforts to expand to other African countries. It must thus be given every support by the government and other decision makers to ensure a successful launch into Africa.

It therefore beats our imagination why anyone in government would be plotting the demise of a company that is helping the country solve one of her development challenges -waste management.