Not even the National Sanitation Day Clean-Up Exercise is encouraging enough to compel residents around the area to organise themselves to distill the choked gutters they created by dumping rubbish in the gutters.

Throwing of rubbish into gutters, choke these gutters and causes major disturbances in homes of residents of the Ablekuma South Constituency in the Greater Accra Region as residents makes no attempt to distill the choked gutters neither has the city authorities made any effort to make the residents clean up the gutters.

 The waste they throw into the gutters leads to floods and also causes erosion underneath houses making the foundation weak and residents around Karikari and Marigold are scared the situation might get worse during the raining season.

Talking to some members living around Karikari and Marigold, they said their worry is the period between May/June when the rains will be severe. They said if care is not taken a lot of people will have their properties destroyed because most homes will be flooded.Knowing the dangers that await them they said they have no other place to relocate to so they only pray that the situation does not get to that level.

According to them, the gutters need to be covered and since they have not been covered, it’s now filled with plastic wastes, rocks and sand thereby blocking the water or waste liquids from passing through it.

They also added that some young people try to make living out of the choked gutters by collecting the sand in the gutters for sale, but they are careless about the rubbish that is collected along with the sand so they dump it at the edges of the gutters only to be pushed back into the gutter.

The smell from the gutters is very unbearable and because the gutters are choked they breed mosquitoes which disturbs them and also infect both the young and the old with malaria.

We are calling on city authorities to help organize them to distill the gutters because doing it by themselves always proves futile. They also suggested the immediate covering of the gutters once the gutters are distilled to prevent them from being choked again.