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Paper short abstract

Accra’s Sanitation Taskforce and Court classify residents as “sanitation offenders”, “bad citizens”, or redeemable subjects when ordinary nuisances become infractions. As officials and residents co-produce urban hygiene, sanitation enforcement becomes a moralized arena where citizenship is sorted.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how urban residents in Accra are classified in the everyday work of Ghana’s Sanitation Taskforce and the Sanitation Court. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with public health inspectors and sanitation guards of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, it traces how ordinary nuisances such as blocked drains, lack of toilets, or informal vending are transformed into infractions, and how those deemed responsible become “sanitation offenders”, “bad citizens”, or, conversely, redeemable subjects. Classification here is not only technical but deeply moral: through house‑to‑house inspections, abatement notices, undertakings, and compulsory training sessions, officers distinguish between residents who “can learn” and those whose “stubbornness” warrants arrest and judicialization.

These categories travel to the Sanitation Court, where prosecutors multiply or drop charges, and where infractions may be recoded as administrative mishaps or elevated into cases “to set the example”. The attitude of the accused is considered by the judge, allowing them to explicitly separate the “redeemable” ones from others. Across this trajectory, residents occupy shifting positions in their interactions with city officials, from patients of public health expertise to environmental hazards and patriotic contributors to urban modernity.

By looking at city officials and residents as coproducers of urban hygiene, the paper argues that sanitation enforcement is a site where citizenship is classified, moralized, and eventually contested. This perspective speaks to broader dilemmas of bureaucratic categorization, showing how attempts to “civilize” the city through sanitary norms also reproduce inequalities in whose practices become visible, punishable, or forgivable.