Staff of the Health Ministry swapped official Friday clothes for T-Shirts and snickers.

They have been directed by the Office of the Chief of Staff to use 8am to 10am to clean their environment.

The President is being closely monitored following his promise to make Accra the cleanest city in Africa by 2020.

The memos and meetings can wait because the environment has waited for so long to be clean again.

To ensure this unusual Friday morning task is executed, some top management officials were eager to check non-compliance.

A van from the Information Services Department was parked on the premises of the Health Ministry in a friendly bark for compliance.

"If you don't participate in this clean-up exercise then, I will bring you, your query letter", a man in the van joked. Accra Metropolitan Assembly brought equipment to cart black silt from gutters and grass.

In the Ministries which form a huge part of government employees, Joy News' Maxwell Agbagba reported, about 30 employees were seen cutting grass, collecting litter and cleaning gutters.

He also visited the Education Ministry and the Lands and Natural Resources Ministry where similar levels of participation were seen.

Deputy Lands and Natural Resources Minister, Benito Owusu Bio praised the government's directive.

"They say charity begins at home.... if we are to do this often ...then we are showing a good example to the people to emulate," he said urging government officials and appointees to support the president.

A staff at the Health Ministry also said: "this morning alone the kind of filth that we have collected here has been surprising."

Some staff expressed hope that the clean-up exercise will be made a weekly Friday fixture.

The sustainability question plagued the previous government's sanitation exercise.

Then Local Government Minister, Julius Debrah, announced a clean-up exercise on the first Saturday of every month following a deadly Cholera outbreak.

Starting November 2014, government officials visited regions to garner support for the exercise.

Enthusiasm waned and the exercise ceased by January 2017 with a new government inaugurated.

It is not clear whether the Friday clean-up will be regular but there are concerns that if cleaning u on a weekend Saturday did not last, what chance does Friday have.