The city does not end where the pavement stops. It spills into the gutters, the canals, the rivers. Today I walked along the edge of a lagoon near Accra, and I saw what the city leaves behind: plastic bottles, market refuse, animal waste, broken electronics, and leaking batteries.
The water was sluggish, green with algae, carrying the smell of rot. No fish broke the surface. The silence was its own verdict.
We speak often of climate change and mining, but waste is the quiet third force turning our waters sour.
Unlike galamsey, it is not carried out with machines. Unlike global CO₂, it does not arrive unseen from the skies. It is our daily act of neglect. We drop, we dump, we pour, and the rivers bear it.
The chemistry is simple, cruel, and relentless. Organic waste from farms and markets washes into rivers, feeding algae with nitrogen and phosphorus.
The blooms look harmless at first—green swirls on the surface, fish hiding beneath. But when the algae die, they decompose, consuming oxygen and releasing CO₂ into the water.
The oxygen falls, the CO₂ rises, and the river acidifies. Fish suffocate not only from lack of air but from water turning corrosive. This is eutrophication —the cycle of excess, collapse, and decay.
I have seen it in lagoons from Benin to Côte d’Ivoire. Once, fishers cast their nets near the mangroves, pulling up tilapia, catfish, and prawns.
Now the nets come back slimy, clogged with weeds, or worse, empty. Women who smoke fish for market complain of scarcity, of prices too high for buyers. Children carry buckets heavier with waste than with catch.
But it is not only food waste. Landfills leak their poison, too. In Accra, Kumasi, Lagos, and Abidjan—every rainy season, the dumpsites bleed.
Black water, called leachate, flows into streams. It carries acids, heavy metals, and plastics broken down into invisible fragments.
It lowers the pH of wetlands, making fish nurseries into graveyards. It seeps into groundwater, making wells taste bitter. The communities living closest know the taste; they drink it when no other option remains.
Factories add their own chapter to this story. Tanneries, breweries, and textile plants discharge effluents, sometimes untreated, into rivers.
The water foams with detergent, stings with acid, and reeks of ammonia. Governments have rules, but rules dissolve where bribes flow.
The river becomes a dumping ground, cheaper than treatment plants. The price is paid not in corporate accounts but in poisoned ecosystems and sickened children.
Plastics float everywhere, a new form of sediment. They do not cause acidification directly, but they suffocate wetlands, block oxygen exchange, trap heat, and release toxins as they degrade.
Microplastics lodge in fish gills, in stomachs, and in the flesh sold at the market. The fishers tell me, “We open the belly, and it is full of plastic.” Acidification and plastics are not separate; they are partners in weakening the resilience of life in the water.
Science names it all with precision: eutrophication, leachate, biochemical oxygen demand, pH decline, microplastic bioaccumulation. But the fishers, the market women, the children by the shore—they know it in their own terms. They say: “The river is sick.”
I often think of the injustice of this sickness. Waste is not evenly made, nor evenly suffered. The wealthier districts have trucks that collect their refuse. The poorer districts are left with burning dumps and overflowing gutters.
In coastal villages, where infrastructure fails, the lagoon becomes the dump. The very communities most dependent on fish are those forced to poison their waters with waste.
And still, we build. Still, we consume. Still, we turn our backs when the waste leaves our hands. We believe it has disappeared because it is out of sight.
But the rivers remember. They carry our neglect to the sea, where acidification from CO₂ meets acidification from waste, a confluence of global and local wounds.
The fishers notice. In conversations from Lamu to Freetown, they tell me the same story in different words: “The fish are fewer. The water is dirty. The children fall sick.”
Their testimony is more than anecdote; it is the frontline record of ecological decline. It deserves to be read with the same seriousness as scientific surveys, because it is knowledge carried in lived experience.
Sometimes I wonder if we will only understand when the silence grows too loud. When the markets run out of fish. When the lagoons are nothing but sludge.
When cholera and typhoid spread after every rain. Waste is not a side issue; it is a central threat. Yet it hides behind the glamour of climate conferences and mining scandals.
It is too ordinary, too daily, too close to be seen for what it is: a slow acid burning through the foundation of our food security.
But writing these words, I feel a flicker of hope. Waste is not like CO₂; it is not invisible or global beyond our reach. It is made by us, and it can be managed by us. Composting, recycling, sewage treatment, and bans on dumping—all are possible.
The science is clear, the solutions known. What is missing is the will and the honesty to see that waste is not disappearing when it leaves our hands.
I close my notebook as the sun sets over the lagoon. The water glows red with the last light. From a distance, it looks beautiful. But beauty is not health.
I know what flows beneath that glow. The waste of our hands has written itself into the chemistry of this water. It has made the river sick.
The silence deepens.
Mare nostrum, vita nostra.
Richard Dablah
Email: richard.dablah@gmail.com
Source: asaaseradio.com
