By Naomi Nsoh Ayinsongya (UniMAC-IJ, Faculty of Journalism nsohnaomi89@gmail.com)
Markets are a special place where sellers sell out their items or foodstuffs to buyers for purchase. Market is a place for business and in every business place especially, dealing with customers or consumers, the place has to be serine and conducive for easy life. Places like the bank and malls are always clean and sometimes, I wonder why our market place is always filthy with dirt and even some of our foodstuffs sold are unhygienic to consume.
The food we consume is our life, and the food we eat determines our health status. Many people die out of strange disease, which is sometimes from the food we consume. Healthy food makes a healthy living and if the food we purchase from our markets are unhygienic and the environment are not clean and is embodied with chunk of rubbish, alongside with bad smell all over with dirty gutters, what shows that our health is not at stake.
On Saturday, July 13,2024, all shops and markets in the Central Business District (CBD) within the Ga traditional area were supposed to close from 6am to 12pm as a result of the Homowo clean- up exercise. The clean-up exercise is part of the activities put in place to mark this year’s annual Homowo festival which represents the Ga people of the Greater Accra Region. If this exercise had not been the initiative of the Ga people, ordered by their chief, King Tackie Teiko Tsuru II, Ga Mantse urging all chiefs and Ga state to fully participate in the clean-up exercise, our markets will be left unconcerned and unattended to. We are one people; we should work together as a nation to keep our environment clean. This can be done by helping with communal labour with the Zoom Lions and individually refraining from littering.
We should put some of these things to heart and just not ignore vital places like the markets untouched, and see it as normal or nothing. The things we consider nothing can be very harmful and our health is the most crucial part of our lives. We should always take the initiative to keep our markets clean because, it is a place for trading where we meet a lot of people. Day in and day out, as we move about in the market, we can contract diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea and catarrh.
It is said that, cleanliness is next to Godliness so, let us always keep our markets clean for a healthy living.
