By Clement Akoloh
Accra, September 3, 2026 — The Minister of Local Government, Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs, Mahama Ayariga, has announced plans to mobilise national resources to clear decades-old waste choking the Korle Lagoon at Jamestown and redevelop the area into liveable, low-cost housing.
The Minister said the government was determined to tackle the environmental and sanitation crisis at the Jamestown damping site after a familiarisation tour of the area to assess the extent of waste accumulation and the sludge that has developed around the lagoon.
Mr Ayariga said the scale of the problem was far greater than what could be appreciated from a distance.
“We see this waste from afar. We drive by, we really have no sense of the enormity of the challenge. And standing here, you can see how high we are above ground level. That gives you an indication of what has piled up.”
According to him, the waste appeared to have accumulated over several decades, creating a major obstruction to the free flow of water in the lagoon and worsening the environmental conditions in the surrounding community.
Government mobilises national capacity
Mr Ayariga said the Ministry of Local Government would collaborate with the Ministries of Roads and Highways, Defence, Finance, and Environment, Science and Technology to undertake a major evacuation exercise.
He said the government would mobilise what he described as the country’s “national capacity” to remove the waste from the site and transport it to an appropriate disposal location.
The Minister said the government had already identified a landfill site at Adepa in the Eastern Region as one of the locations to which the waste could be transported.
“We are now going to go back, sit with the Minister for Roads, sit with the Minister for Finance, and then the representative of the Minister of Defence is here,” he said.
He disclosed that the government would also engage private contractors operating in the Greater Accra, Eastern and Central regions to support the exercise with heavy-duty equipment, particularly during weekends when some of their machinery was not being used on construction sites.
DRIP equipment to support exercise
Mr Ayariga said the Ministry of Local Government would deploy equipment acquired under the District Road Improvement Programme (DRIP) to support the clean-up.
He said the Ministry had access to at least 100 trucks and more than 16 excavators, bulldozers, loaders and other equipment that could be mobilised for the exercise.
“We will mobilize ours first, then we would invite all the contractors to assist us with equipment during the weekends when they are not at site,” he said.
The objective, he explained, was to begin evacuating the accumulated waste immediately and subsequently redevelop the area.
No eviction of residents
Mr Ayariga said the government’s redevelopment plan would not involve forcibly evicting residents from the community.
Rather, he said, the state would seek to reorganise the settlement by developing affordable, vertical housing that would allow residents to remain close to their places of work.
“I’m not a believer in moving them out of this place,” he said.
“What I think the state should do is to redevelop it into high-rise, liveable spaces.”
He argued that many residents of the area provided essential services to the wider city and should therefore not be displaced to distant locations.
The Minister said the government would explore partnerships with the private sector and development partners to develop affordable housing facilities that would make more efficient use of the available land.
Vertical housing
Mr Ayariga said the high population density of the area made vertical development a more practical solution than allowing the settlement to continue expanding horizontally.
He suggested that modern, low-cost housing could accommodate the population on a much smaller portion of the existing land.
“You have just organised them in such a way that they go vertical instead of this horizontal layout that occupies the entire space,” he said.
He acknowledged that any redevelopment would have to respect the rights of residents and adhere to international human rights principles governing the redevelopment of informal settlements.
“As a human rights person myself, I know the principles governing how to manage slum communities,” he said.
Economic activities to change
The Minister, however, cautioned that redevelopment would inevitably affect some economic activities currently taking place in the area.
He specifically cited cattle rearing, which he said could no longer continue in the area once the redevelopment programme began.
Mr Ayariga said the government would instead seek to create new economic opportunities within the redeveloped area, allowing residents to benefit from jobs and other livelihood opportunities.
He said the Minister of Finance had assured him that there were plans to create economic opportunities in the area once the waste had been cleared.
“We’ll create economic opportunities in the same space where they were and then they will also benefit by finding jobs at those locations that they use rather as slum settlements,” he said.
The Minister said the immediate priority remained clearing the enormous volume of waste, after which the government would pursue a comprehensive redevelopment programme aimed at improving sanitation, housing and livelihoods in the Jamestown community.
Source: parliamentnews360.com
