More than 70% of homes visited by Rite News on Monday to assess the availability of toilet facilities for domestic use has uncovered rather disappointing findings.
The visit which falls in line with this year’s World Toilet Day discovered that the houses, many of them compound houses were without toilet facilities compelling residents to fall on public places of convenience to attend to nature’s call.
Worldwide, 4.5 billion people live without “safely managed sanitation” and around 892 million people practise open defecation.
World Toilet Day (WTD) 2018 being celebrated under the theme, ‘When nature calls,’ is an official United Nations international observance day to inspire action to tackle the global sanitation crisis.
The Sustainable Development Goal 6 aims to achieve sanitation for all and end open defecation.
While most landlords contacted by Rite news blamed the lack of resources on their inability to construct toilet facilities for their households, others blamed the situation on the absence of land space for the purpose.
“I wish I had a toilet facility in my house but unfortunately, I can’t afford the cost of constructing one due to financial difficulties,’ one distraught landlord told Rite news’ Naa Atwe in an interview on Monday, adding that their forefathers cannot escape blame as they failed to put up toilet facilities in their homes.
While most residents are forced to resort to the use of public places of convenience as a result of the absence of the facility in their homes, many say this comes at great inconvenience to them.
Francis, a resident of Somanya regrets the situation and said, “The public toilet we attend is very bad. Refuse is dumped there which attracts houseflies and other insects which makes the place unhealthy for human use.”
For most households however, there is no space to site a place of convenience for use by occupants of a house. A distraught landlord who simply identified himself as Sammy says though he attempted putting up the facility, sanitation officers stopped him citing the wrong location of the facility as improper.
