Copyright 1998 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
July 31, 1998, Friday
WHO'S TAKING OUT THE TRASH? / MOST NIGERIANS, BUT ONLY INTO THE STREETS
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Lagos, Nigeria - It's the last Saturday of July, and as on the last Saturday of each month, little is moving in Lagos. This is Environmental Day, the one day each month when by law people must spend the morning sweeping the streets outside their homes and trying to get rid of, or at least conceal, the filth of this astoundingly filthy city.
"They're not keen," admits the man in charge of this mission, Emmanuel Festus Golit, who is being interviewed on national television and taking questions from viewers calling in to discuss things like how best to store their trash. "I would say maybe 50 percent of the people take part. Perhaps next month we'll get 60 percent."
Cleanup day lasts till 10 a.m. Until then, no cars except those on official business are permitted on the streets. Residents are expected to collect the bottles, cans, paper, rags and other shreds of trash from around their homes and pile them into trash containers or neat piles for the state to pick up and deposit in the city's dumps.
The United Nations Development Program estimated in a 1996 report that 89 percent of Nigerian households were using unhygienic means for getting rid of waste - in other words, dumping it anywhere they wanted. That, combined with the fact that only 31 percent of households have access to safe drinking water, no doubt contributes heavily to the poor health conditions that have given Nigeria one of Africa's worst child mortality rates. About 20 percent of children don't reach age 5, according to the UN, and dysentery is the cause of death second only to malaria.
Many in Lagos seem oblivious to the mountains of litter that line their streets and send acrid clouds of smoke into the air when people try to burn them away. A mound of waste rises behind a sign declaring "Do not drop rubbish here." Men nonchalantly face walls declaring "Don't urinate here" and do just that. Attempts to put garbage where it belongs appear futile. After the latest Environmental Day, a garbage bin downtown was stuffed to twice its height with trash, sending the excess tumbling into the street to be blown away in the wind or washed into the clogged sewers in the next rainstorm.
Garbage is serious business in Lagos, a city of an estimated 9 million people living in a country where basic services like trash collection and electric power have been allowed to collapse by a succession of corrupt, neglectful governments. The spectacle of an official of the current military government such as Golit, in full military regalia no less, sitting on national television telling people they should clean up the city isn't lost on viewers. "Isn't this something the state should be doing?" says one woman incredulously as she clears away breakfast dishes in a hotel restaurant.
"It's the job of all citizens to keep Lagos clean," says Golit, commander of the Lagos State Waste Disposal Board, which estimates it picked up 26 million tons of garbage last month. Judging by the streets, that's a tiny portion of what needed to be collected.
Just ask Dr. Funlola Harold-Sodipo of the Lifeline Children's Hospital. Rather than depend on the government to cart away the daily accumulation of trash, much of it dangerous medical waste, the clinic hired a private contractor. Before long they were visited by Waste Disposal Board officials demanding they sign a contract to use its services and agree to pay for daily pickup.
"It was very little, only about 250 naira a month officially, 85 naira equal one dollar , but we said no, we didn't want to sign, because we had arranged things for ourselves," said Harold-Sodipo. The state persisted and eventually served the clinic with an order to either sign the contract and pay, or go to court. They kept the private firm but "In the end, to avoid going to court, we signed and paid," she said. "If we're lucky they come once a month."
Golit advised viewers to buy a trash can and put it outside the house so they wouldn't be tempted to toss the day's trash out the front door onto the street. With Nigeria's population increasing at an alarmingly high rate of 3.4 percent annually, and cities like Lagos burgeoning with millions more people than they were built to hold, it's clear trash cans alone won't do the trick.
Officials in Ibadan, the capital of neighboring Oyo state, say they may have the ultimate weapon in what Golit describes as a veritable "war" on the burgeoning trash problem. The state governor, Col. Ahmed Usman, wearing a mask over his nose and mouth, recently oversaw the opening of an Ibadan factory that claims to be the first in Africa dedicated to transforming garbage into organic fertilizer for farmers.
The factory, designed by a group of professors at the University of Ibadan, was dreamed up after Usman expressed shock at the filth of Ibadan, whose big Bodija market alone produces as much as 40 tons of garbage daily. Ideally, officials say, the factory will provide farmers with fertilizer far cheaper than the chemical-laden products most currently used, while taking the country a step forward in its battle against blight.
thanks alot
Posted by: houssam | May 31, 2008 at 03:56 AM