There’s something unsettling about vultures. In many cultural contexts, it is a symbol of ominous presence and cold opportunism. It circles patiently, sensing weakness and waiting for the precise moment to descend. In literature and political metaphor, the vulture represents three key traits: it heralds death or decay, embodies cold opportunism by feeding off the misfortunes of others, and thrives in spaces where moral restraint has broken down. In Ghana’s sanitation sector, few metaphors ring truer—and few companies embody this predatory patience better than Zoomlion Ghana Limited.
Walk through any Ghanaian city or town, from the sprawling chaos of Accra to the quieter streets of Tanyigbe, and you’ll see the same story: mounting waste choking drains, polluting air, and turning every rainy season into a nightmare of floods and filth. The Environmental Protection Agency talks big. The Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) make promises. Yet sanitation remains one of our most spectacularly mismanaged public sectors. Into this mess flew Zoomlion, ready to feast.
Founded in 2006 under the Jospong Group umbrella, Zoomlion didn’t just enter Ghana’s waste management space—it devoured it. Through what can generously be called “partnerships” with government (and less generously called something else entirely), the company secured contract after contract: street cleaning, waste collection, youth employment schemes. The visibility was impressive. Waste bins and collection trucks appeared everywhere. Uniformed workers became a common sight. Politicians smiled at ribbon-cutting ceremonies. The efficiency? Well, that’s where things get interesting.
When the Vulture Met Its Match
Investigative journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni has never been one to mistake visibility for effectiveness. Since 2013, while government officials and the clergy were busy praising Zoomlion’s “transformation” of Ghana’s sanitation landscape, Manasseh was doing what too few journalists do: following the money.
What he found should have surprised no one familiar with how business gets done in this country. Under the most recent contract, for instance which expired in 2024, an amount of GHS 850 was allocated monthly to each sanitation worker from government coffers under the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) Programme. But the workers took home only GHS 250. The remaining GHS 600? Well, someone had to pay for all those shiny trucks and executive salaries, didn’t they? The contract also empowered Zoomlion to charge interest on delayed payments from YEA, leading to a GHS 90million interest claim in 2024 alone.
But Manasseh didn’t stop at exposing the arithmetic of exploitation. His documentaries revealed a pattern that extended beyond Ghana’s borders. In Liberia, Zoomlion faced accusations of failing to meet waste management expectations in Monrovia. More damning still, a 2018 World Bank report blacklisted Zoomlion Liberia, a subsidiary of the Jospong Group, for alleged procurement fraud. Suddenly, Ghana’s “sanitation success story” looked less like an innovation and more like a continental con game.
Perhaps the most remarkable moment came this year when Manasseh petitioned President John Dramani Mahama directly, calling for the cancellation of Zoomlion’s contract with the YEA. President Mahama responded swiftly and favourably, promising to decentralize waste management (and its procurement processes) to the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAS).
It was a brief, shining moment when investigative journalism actually influenced state action. But anyone who thought this marked the end of Zoomlion’s feast was being naively optimistic.
The Vulture Still Circles
The excitement following the President Mahama’s directive was cut short when few days later, Zoomlion announced its readiness to participate in the waste management tendering process at the local levels. The persistence of this vulture-like presence and dominance begs a sobering question: what does it really take to get the vulture off waste? The answer is more complex and more depressing than we might hope. It takes more than exposés. It is not enough to expose corruption—though Manasseh’s work proves such exposure can have impact. It is not enough to have a president willing to act—though Mahama’s cancellation of that contract showed what’s possible when political will meets public pressure. The problem runs deeper than individual contracts or even individual companies.
Zoomlion’s dominance reflects a broader failure of institutional design. We have created a system where waste management contracts continue to raise eyebrows, where the same players resurface under different arrangements, where the space between public service and private profit has become so blurred that we can barely tell where one ends and the other begins.
Consider the irony: in a country where it takes teachers, doctors and other workers months of negotiations and agitations to get their expired conditions of service renewed, we somehow easily find hundreds of millions of cedis to funnel toward waste management contracts that deliver more wealth to contractors than cleanliness to communities. It is the kind of priority-setting that would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.
Beyond the Metaphor
The vulture metaphor only takes us so far. Real vultures serve an important ecological function—they clean up what others leave behind. Ghana’s sanitation vultures do the opposite: they create more mess while feeding off public resources meant to solve the very problems they perpetuate.
Getting the vulture off waste requires more than exposés, though investigative journalism like Manasseh’s remains crucial. It demands consistent political will—not just the occasional presidential intervention, but systematic reform of how contracts are awarded, monitored, and evaluated. It requires an independent, well-resourced anti-corruption apparatus with teeth sharp enough to bite those who think they’re untouchable.
Most importantly, it demands a citizenry that refuses to normalize decay—whether in our streets or in our institutions. As long as we accept that “this is how things work in Ghana,” the vultures will keep circling, keep feeding, keep growing fat while our cities drown in their own waste.
The question isn’t whether we can get the vulture off waste. The question is whether we have the collective will to stop feeding it in the first place. Until we do, every rainy season will remind us of what happens when we let scavengers run the system they’re supposed to clean.