Nairobi — Development agents should consult people in their development agenda. People ought to be involved in development project's planning and implementation for positive change to be realised.
A taskforce sent to the Upper-West region in North-western Ghana to calm the nerves of the enraged people of Bulenga and investigate circumstances leading to the expulsion of the District Environmental Health Officer said the officer was wrong in alleging that the people had refused to use modern facilities provided for them. Critical observers were quick to point out that the incident was a clear case of the now out-of-fashion 'top-down approach' to development where a group of experts come out with innovations according to their own parochial and patronising definition of development.
They then transport these innovations to a client community and implement them without consultation, and in the hope that the people would be 'empathetic' enough to adopt the innovations.
The Environmental Health Officer for Bulenga, Adam Salia Mohammed was widely quoted in the mass media to have said the people of Bulenga had refused to use a 12-unit toilet facility built by the District Assembly because it was against their traditional beliefs for elders and children to relieve themselves at the same place.
The officer had also claimed the people had refused to drink water from the boreholes sunk for them because the water there was salty as compared to the water from the stream they were used to.
He is also said to have attributed the spread of guinea worm in the community to the villagers' refusal to drink the 'cleaner' water. The people took offence at the remarks described as disparaging and immediately expelled him from the community. A taskforce headed by the District Chief Executive (DCE), Alhaji Ali Siedu Pelpuo was set up to deflate the tension and investigate the allegations.
The taskforce revealed that the impression the Environmental Health Officer sought to create was wrong. Independent investigations by the state-owned Ghana News Agency, which has reporters in all the nooks and crooks of the country confirmed that the people of Bulenga were actually drinking from the boreholes and making good use of the toilet facilities provided.
The DCE described the Environmental Health officer as an "arrant liar who had failed to contribute to the improvement of sanitation in the town". Mr. Kanbonna Seidu, spokesperson for the chief of the town told newsmen that the people of Bulenga have drunk water from boreholes since 1954. "Also, the more than 2,000 inhabitants of this town see nothing wrong with sharing places of convenience with their young ones", he noted.
Though calm has returned to Bulenga people with critical perspectives on development insist that even if the people of Bulenga were found to have truly refused to patronise the so-called 'modern facilities' they would not simply have been described as 'primitive' and 'underdeveloped'. Mr. Peter L. Berger (1976) has stated that "modernity exacts a high price on the level of meaning. Those who are unwilling to pay this price must be taken with utmost seriousness, and not dismissed as 'primitive' or 'irrational".
In a rural community such as Bulenga, an Environmental Health Officer is a change agent whose role in encouraging the diffusion of innovations and their adoption is crucial. Especially so when President Rawlings noted in his address to Parliament that many diseases that afflict rural communities are attributable to poor environmental sanitation.
The Guinea worm disease for instance which was almost eradicated from Ghana has resurged in some rural areas. Reported cases dropped drastically from 180,000 in 1989 to 4,500 in 1996 and went up steadily again to 5,500 in 1999. As a way of minimising the spread of communicable diseases such as these, each of the 110 districts is served by an Environmental Health Officer whose responsibility is to ensure that people use clean drinking water and also patronise public places of convenience.
If change agents will continue to play a meaningful role in helping bring about improvement in the lifestyles of people, they must adopt consultation and dialogue to encourage the adoption of innovations. In a Presidential election campaign address as far back as 1912 Woodrow Wilson saw the need to always involve the people when he said, "only as men are brought into counsel and state their own needs and interests can the general interests of the greater people be compounded into a policy suitable to all."
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The 'top-down approach' or the 'bullet approach' in which pre-ordained projects and programmes are transferred to communities for implementation without consultation should be discarded in favour of the 'horizontal approach'. The 'horizontal approach' involves the people's participation at every stage of decision making - from the determination of priority needs and interests, through the search for solutions to the execution, monitoring and evaluation processes.
AFRICANEWS News & Views on Africa from Africa Koinonia Media Centre, P.O. Box 8034, Nairobi, Kenya email: amani@iol.it
