Cleaning Up Politically or Cleaning Ghana? The Costly Populism Behind AMA and YEA’s Sanitation Gamble

 

By Nana Kofi Barfour | nbobonsu@gmail.com

Imagine a humid Monday morning in Accra, a young man called Joseph stands at the middle of UTC, Accra-Central with a broom in hand probably taller than himself. Joseph has been unemployed for more than two years and now, under the Accra Metro Assembly’s (AMA) GH¢100-a-day street sweeping initiative, he finally can depend on an income. Well, its good money, but the question is: how long will it last? This uncertainty reflects a deeper national dilemma, one that Ghana naively refuses to confront.

A few months before this AMA initiative was made public, the Youth Employment Authority (YEA) quietly proposed a 300 per cent increase in its Sanitation Module Beneficiary allowances up to a figure over GH¢750 from the initial GH¢258. This move came after YEA’s suspension of its contract with Zoomlion Ghana Limited, claiming dissatisfaction with the allowance structure for the beneficiaries. This proposal, while ostensibly a relief for workers, inadvertently exposed a political and financial reality: the state could not sustain a GH¢258 allowance that it earlier on had successfully implemented through Zoomlion for years. This by effect admits that Zoomlion, the private contractor, had been running a sound operational system that the government could not replicate nor could even sustain financially as it still owes Zoomlion and the beneficiaries huge sums of money.

This context raises a fundamental question: If the state struggles to justify a GH¢258 payment sustainably, how does another agency or AMA alone to be precise plan to sustain GH¢3,000 per worker a month for sweeping the streets? The answer, unfortunately, seems motivated by political expediency than by a comprehensible urban management.

A Programme Designed for Political Optics, Not Practical Outcomes
At an initial glance, the AMA initiative looks compassionate. Paying GH¢100 per day places instant cash in the pockets of unemployed youth. When this is rolled out, we will see videos of young sweepers cleaning ceremonial roads flood social media, giving the impression of decisive governance. Yet, one can only describe this as a case of political theatre masquerading as policy. The optic will be immediate but the sustainability obviously is absent.

Let’s not forget as a country that, sanitation is one of the most infrastructure-dependent sectors in urban management. Any government that substitutes mechanised systems for mass manual labour is perhaps choosing political convenience over economic logic. This is unassailable.

Cleaning a modern city is not simply about sweeping dust; it requires transfer stations, trucks, recycling plants, mechanised sweepers, predictable funding, and structured supervision, if not more. YEA and AMA’s model prioritise more on wages over systems. This is more like a textbook example of a policy designed to score quick political points rather than build an urban capacity that is long lasting.

Zoomlion: Structured Capacity Underappreciated and Misunderstood
Zoomlion has over the years suffered criticism over opacity, alleged political influence, and worker remuneration, yet had delivered something AMA’s sanitation module cannot: a scalable, functioning sanitation system. Zoomlion has built and maintained hundreds of mechanised sweepers, thousands of collection trucks, regional depots and recycling centres over more than a decade. There were operational assets that allowed Accra to manage waste efficiently, and these investments are tangible.

It is a confirmed fact that the GH¢258 allowance was a small component of a much larger, logistics-intensive system. What people don’t realise is that Zoomlion allocated fee includes fuel, trucks, repairs, medical support, uniforms, supervisors, and waste carting, if not more. This wasn’t just a wage contract; it was full operational contract.

The paradox is undeniable: while critics stay fixated on the GH¢258 payment to beneficiaries, they ignored that Zoomlion had absorbed the heavy operational costs the government could not. YEA’s proposed increment of 300% after Zoomlion’s suspension is effectively conceding the point.

Not being in denial is to acknowledge the fact that Zoomlion was never about sweepers. It was about the operational machinery beneath Ghana’s sanitation system. Eliminating it without an equivalent infrastructure become a political choice, not a technical and a sustainable one. And what will these infrastructure be used for if government even is able to establish its own infrastructure. Waste management, the world across has only been successful through private partnership and not government owned.

The Real Cost of AMA’s Wage-Heavy Approach
Let’s do the math. GH¢100 per worker per day translates GH¢3,000 per month. A 1,000-person deployment will cost GH¢3 million monthly. This arithmetic is unambiguous. Realistically, Accra requires several thousands of workers to cover effectively all districts. This means that a recurring wage easily exceeding GH¢9 million monthly, before any equipment, fuel, PPE, logistical overhead and so on.

Clearly, this is more of an unsustainable political employment scheme rather than a sanitation model. This looks like Ghana is setting itself up for a budgetary quagmire where its topmost priority is optics of politics over the reality of operations. The financial logic supporting the YEA’s allowance proposal, supports the point that even the state struggled to maintain GH¢258 sustainably, yet AMA is now trying to pay ten times that without any supporting systems.

Political Symbolism at the Expense of Urban Functionality
YEA’s suspension of Zoomlion’s contract is a political theatre in its unadulterated form. It is ignoring the systemic consequences all in the name of administrative independence from the previous one. This can only be termed as classic malalignment between public delivery system and political symbolism.

It is obvious that for state to run a full house sanitation model, it needs trucks, build transfer stations, maintain mechanised sweepers, and run recycling plants, if not more. This requires capital budget, and not just daily wage bills. Ending Zoomlion only satisfies a political narrative, but the reality is that it is dismantling a functional sanitation ecosystem that the government cannot replace. It is a short-term political win that comes with a long-term cost repercussion for both taxpayers and urban management.

The Dangerous Economics of Reinventing the Wheel
While criticised, Zoomlion’s contract created predictable, amortised costs. The company absorbed capital expenses, maintained systems, and ensured operational continuity. AMA and YEA’s programme in contrast, creates permanent recurring costs with little to no asset creation. This causes the city to risk a scenario where sanitation is not measured by cleanliness but by the size of its payroll.

Another reality is, replacing a mechanised sanitation architecture with a politically charged cash-for-sweeping programme is economically suicidal and systemic failure. Accra will only learn this the hard way. This rhetoric is unambiguous: Ghana cannot afford to substitute systems with sentiments. Every Ghana cedi spent on temporary political goodwill is a cedi not invested in long-term urban resilience.

Ghana needs to prioritise sound, long-term policy making and systemic development over short-term populist spending driven by political motives. Economic and development decisions should be based on a healthy, institutional systems well-thought-out and data-driven policies, rather than a temporary political good-will. While doing this, the state emphasises on sustainable infrastructure and reforms that can withstand environmental challenges to ensure lasting citizenry benefits.

Politically Convenient but Unsustainable
The government suspends Zoomlion’s contract over an allegedly inadequate allowance of GH¢258; YEA admits the allowance is insufficient even though it wasn’t authorised by Zoomlion and now the same government through YEA proposes an increment of 300%; AMA launches a GH¢100-per-day programme costing exponentially more per worker. This is complete double standards. The debate does not include logistics, mechanisation, tech-driven infrastructure and supervision. The remaining scenes are episodes of a political theatre replacing engineering and systems.

Despite Zoomlion’s imperfections, the company offered mechanisation, tech-driven innovations, national coverage, operational continuity, and infrastructure, while AMA’s programme offers wages and applause. A city like Accra where urban sanitation is a structural problem, the obvious choice is systems, not symbolism. Cleaning a city requires efficiency and sustainability.

The stark lesson of this unfortunate politics is that, policy cannot be a popularity contest. Ghana’s recurring error is a dismantlement of a functional system in the name of unhealthy politics. If AMA's initiative fails, as evidence and thorough analysis indicate it might, the country faces high cost overheads, a more polluted city, and a severe political backlash.