More About Zebilla - infrastructure and facilities

Coming to Zebilla from Bolgatanga (Bolga to everyone here), twenty miles away, the road passes through several villages.  These are really no more than collections of homesteads, built mainly in the traditional style of a “compound” comprising a couple of larger, rectangular “houses” with corrugated zinc roofs plus several smaller, thatched, circular buildings, built around a yard, sometimes with a nice shady tree, all surrounded by a containing wall.  Some of the villages have a school, and some have a communal “awning” which provides shade from the hot sun; and in some there are small tables of produce on speculative sale to the passer-by.  A couple have “customs barriers”, where there are iron gates which can close half or all of the road, and an awning where the officials or police can sit out of the sun.  

Zebilla is distinctly different - much bigger, many more buildings of more modern construction, fewer compounds visible from the road, and much more infrastructure.  There is a petrol station (here they are fuel stations, pronounced “foo-ell”) before you reach the customs barrier and another after it; at the barrier there is the equivalent of a motorway service-station in the form of a large crowd of women selling produce and food (freshly cooked on open fires under the trees by the road), and girls with sachets of “pure water”.  There isn’t a loo though!

Also before the barrier, you have passed the Bawku West District Assembly building (a second three-storey construction in Zebilla!); and next to that, some modest and rather uninspiring single storey buildings which are home to the Ghana Education Service (where I work) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Food.

It’s half a mile from the customs barrier to the centre of town.  You pass a private (ie NGO-funded) clinic with adjoining internet café (which has in the past also housed a micro-finance/credit agency but that seems to have run into the sand), a guest-house/motel, numerous shops and businesses (as previously describec), the police station, and an electricity sub-station.  On your way out the other side, you see a sign to the hospital (quite large, with three wards for, respectively, women, men and children, and a laboratory where they run the blood tests for malaria etc).  There is a rather nice-looking new building which says it will house the post office and looks to be almost ready; we have been told vaguely that it might be open at the end of the year, though the person who told us that didn’t think it was actually going to be a post office in the sense we understood it!  And there is a bank – which would be impressive except that it isn’t connected to the internet and can’t do any significant modern transactions for you (but this part of Ghana is almost entirely a cash economy).  You can at least (and I suspect at most) put your money there in preference to having it in a sock under the mattress! 

You also pass a small school, which on closer inspection turns out to be a private kindergarten and primary school – it’s one of two private schools in Zebilla alongside four or five similar state schools, three Junior High Schools (plus a private one outside the town) and a Senior High School.  Opinions vary as to whether private schools are better than the state offering, but the people with money presumably think they are.

So in terms public infrastructure, Zebilla definitely has a lot more on offer than the surrounding villages.  People from the surrounding area come into Zebilla quite frequently – the market is a major draw, of course.

There are other recognizable utilities.  Public transport is one.  Jane has described to “tro-tro” service that connects Zebilla with Bolga and Bawku.  Having smiled at her description, you should conclude that getting around by public transport is distinctly possible and widely done; that the vehicles and the road they run on are dreadful and dangerous; that people take their lives into their hands quite recklessly and seemingly without protest; and that tro-tro operators and drivers needlessly put their passengers at serious risk and really ought to have more of a social conscience and be subject to some serious regulation. 

There are also buses, including some (a few each day) run by the nationalised Metro Mass Transport Company – whilst they don’t go anywhere meeting the demand for travel between Zebilla and Bolga, they are decent quality if somewhat basic.  From Bolga you can get a luxury air-conditioned coach to the main towns further south, at only slightly higher cost than Metro Mass – which is very affordable (you can get to Accra, the full length of the country, for under twenty pounds – there’s a direct bus which apparently leaves daily at 4am).  There are no railways this far north, and the nearest airport is Tamale.

Zebilla has electricity and many houses are connected.  The quality of the wiring in the houses isn’t great (for example, you regularly have to jiggle the plug in the socket to get the electrons to flow), and it cuts out when there is a heavy storm in the rainy season.  This happens frequently enough for there to be a bespoke term for it in Ghanaian-English (“lights-out”).  Ghana actually does very well for electricity, with most being generated via the hydro-electric infrastructure of Lake Volta (which is the largest man-made lake in West Africa, lying on the eastern side of Ghana adjacent to Togo) and distributed via a national grid.  I don’t recall seeing any power stations and I don’t know where the rest of the electricity comes from.

There is also water.  Outside the town there is a small dam (one person told us there are crocodiles there but others have been skeptical – one day we will check it out) and water is pumped from there to storage tanks at individual houses.  These are known as “polytanks”, and they are black, generally a bit taller than a person, and stand on elevated structures outside the houses.  Where there is vegetation growing elegantly around them softening their visual impact, this is almost certainly an accident or adventitious use of a convenient place to grow pumpkins or water melons; it has nothing to do with aesthetics.  This system of domestic storage tanks is needed because the water is only pumped in the morning.  In theory each tank has a ball-cock system which should shut off the supply when the tank is full.  Ours doesn’t work – I suspect it isn’t unique.  Thus I have to open and close a tap/valve (which is buried in the dirt) to ensure that we don’t run out of water, but that water doesn’t overflow and run to waste.  It isn’t a big deal once you get used to it, but few people would put up with it in the UK.

Not every house is connected to the water - so there seem to be some communal polytanks equipped with a tap, which serve several houses; and there are also quite a lot of bore-holes with manual pumps.   I don’t think many people have to carry water more than a couple of hundred yards.  Before you conclude that all is well, just reflect on how heavy water is and whether in a modern world anyone should be expected to carry it even that distance.  Carrying water is women’s work, and small women start joining in at a young age.

We are told that the water from the dam is treated and is ok to drink – but I don’t know if the local people actually do drink it.  I haven’t been told that the borehole water is safe to drink, but neither have I been warned by local people that it isn’t.  When we arrived, the VSO doctor advised us to filter and boil our water, regardless of where it came from – and that’s what we do.  People here seem to consume a lot of “pure water”, which is bought in polythene “sachets” containing half a litre.  You can buy these everywhere, and they are cheap (about 3 pence each).  People drink quite a lot of water because of the heat here and my impression is that most of it comes in these sachets.  There isn’t running water at work, or in any school that we have visited.   

The other end of the water infrastructure is rather less satisfactory.  Waste water from the sink and bath runs out of the house and drains into the ground, as often as not into the “street” (most of which you will recall, are not paved).  In the rainy season this water mingles with whatever has fallen from heaven – when there are puddles on the ground, the household effluent adds a slimy consistency and vaguely unpleasant odour; but when it rains after a dry day, the effluent is diluted and washed away leaving the place cleaner than it otherwise would be.  In the dry season it drains away quickly, but the pong never quite disappears.  In Bolga and Tamale there are open gutters down which this effluent flows (or stagnates, as the lie of the land dictates).  Mosquitos don’t actually breed in stagnant water but I must say I struggle to see that this system isn’t a health hazard one way or another. 

In our house, the toilets are connected to a separate septic tank.  Other people’s toilets are either similarly connected or compost directly in the ground – so mercifully it isn’t the case that raw sewage runs through the streets as it did in our country in mediaeval times.  However, toilet infrastructure doesn’t seem to be well developed in Ghana (no doubt Jane’s blog will cover school toilets at some point and I might treat you to a description of the facilities at the office).  For entirely understandable reasons, there is plenty of evidence of people “doing their business” outdoors.  It’s clear that toilets have been added fairly recently to some houses (possibly shared between several) – they are outside the “compound” at a respectable/sanitary distance from the house.  I don’t think I have seen any public conveniences in Zebilla (or Bolga, or even Tamale – about which more another time; it’s the largest city in the northern half of Ghana with a population well over half a million people, and we have just spent a week there doing motorcycle training).  There are well-established means of minimizing the health hazards associated with all this, one being that people eat with their right hand and wipe their bottoms with their left – but diseases such as typhoid are quite common here and whilst one should acknowledge the progress that has clearly been made to date, there is definitely scope for further improvement in this particular aspect of public and domestic infrastructure.

Another piece of infrastructure which doesn’t work well here is disposal of rubbish.  I have hinted before that relatively little goes to waste here and that’s a blessing - there seems to be a lot of re-use and recycling driven by poverty and scarcity of resources.  In Zebilla there are no rubbish collections and no communal or public infrastructure for dealing with refuse.  There is litter everywhere.  One of the two main components is the black polythene bags in which you buy your goods from the market (and from shops).  These are provided liberally and people seem to expect them – and they then end up on the ground or blown in trees.  The second component is empty water sachets, which are also polythene bags, quite robust and made of quite thick polythene.  Being heavier they don’t blow about as much.  We’ve heard that some people make beads from them (presumably by melting them down); and a nearby entrepreneur who has a tree nursery plants his seedlings in them.  But activities like these barely make a dent in the litter problem. 

We have heard from VSO volunteers elsewhere in Ghana that there are rubbish collections where they live.  Be that as it may, Bolga, Tamale and Accra are as litter-strewn as Zebilla.  Everyone drops litter, even the educated and well-paid.  It may be a cultural relic, since presumably in the past everything was organic and would compost away (or be eaten by the goats) – whatever it is, a significant culture change is definitely overdue. 

We have been told that we should burn any household rubbish that is burnable (and this seems to include polythene); and that we should throw vegetable waste onto the fields, where goats and pigs will eat it (this seems to be a system that works better in the dry season when vegetation is generally scarce and the animals can’t afford to be picky).  We haven’t had a fire yet and we have quite a collection of burnable rubbish waiting for the day.  We also have cans, nicely washed and ready to be recycled…

To finish on a positive note, the mobile telephone infrastructure here is excellent.  Several networks compete, and Ghanaians join in enthusiastically and quite often seem to have a phone on each network (so that they can benefit from any intra-network offers!)  We understand that this has all come about over the past five to ten years and has transformed this aspect of communications – there is either virtually or absolutely no fixed-wire telephone infrastructure. 

There isn’t a postal service either – if you want to send something you first have to take it to Bolga, and you can receive stuff there poste restante.  Ghanaians don’t appear to be great letter-writers though!  But there is local and national radio, and you can get both satellite and terrestrial TV.