Our environment stinks and this is no exaggeration. Wherever you look there is an eyesore waiting to grab your attention. Apart from Abuja metropolis, which is our only wurin fita kuya, saving grace, every other major town and city in Nigeria is groaning under the weight of refuse, blocked drainages and open, nauseating, top of the street gutters. Things are so bad in some areas that people just move about and do their normal things in the midst of massive dirt because they have come to consider living in filth a normal lifestyle.
Several states and local governments have re-instated the military-imposed month-end sanitation exercise, out of the need to rid our environment of dirt but in almost all places, the exercise is only observed in the breach. Residents just remain at home to sleep those first three hours of sanitation Saturday or watch TV in some cases, but no one gives a thought to the environmental sanitation exercise. Meanwhile all sorts of health problems emanate from this neglect of basic preventive hygiene. Every year we experience cholera epidemics because the stage is always set for the infection to break and spread. Malaria is our number one murderer because its breeding ground is the commonest feature of all our towns and cities, refuse dumps and gutters. Flooding occurs and recurs every rainy season because our drainages are always blocked and poor town planning does not provide for water passages that will allow free flow in times of heavy down pours.
And it shouldn’t be this way. In fact it did not use to be this way just a few decades ago. I know that as a young school girl in the late seventies and early eighties, one of our favourite pastimes was going for strolls in the Nasarawa GRA of Kano which was just across the street from our traditional quarters in Tarauni ward. On Thursdays and Fridays because there was no makarantar allo, local Quranic school to go to, my younger siblings and I will just cross the street into Lamido Crescent, and stroll down the road to the other streets and crescents, all the while enjoying the beauty of the clean streets, the well-manicured hedges and the beautiful flower beds that adorned the GRA streets. The occasional dog will bark at us as we pass by, prompting us to break into a run. But generally those strolls are rewarding for just the beauty we saw and admired.
Even back at our local surroundings, we had designated refuse dumps and fairly well-maintained drainages, which made our environment a lot cleaner than what we see today. The activities of ‘yan aikin gayya, community self-help groups, which regularly embarked on general cleaning exercises amidst singing and dancing made it impossible for our localities to harbour the kind of dirt we see in our surroundings today. Needless to say today we no longer have such GRAs and our local habitations have grown into filthy slums. But it isn’t like this everywhere you go. The few times I have been abroad I am yet to see towns and cities as dirty as ours here. I have been to countries in Africa, the Gulf region and some parts of Europe and Asia, still I say as far as dirty surroundings are concerned we really do take the day.
Cairo for instance is the largest and most crowded city in Africa and the Arab world combined, but despite its relative dirt, it is nowhere near the dirt in Kano, Ibadan or Lagos before Fashola. Cairo streets are still well-paved, no open gutters and certainly no mountainous rubbish heaps can be found anywhere, and I have been to Cairo four times.
Yet a clean, healthy environment is not achieved without deliberate effort. During my first trip to Turkey in 2007, I was so impressed by the cleanliness and beauty of the city, the incredible flower beds adorning the pavements on every street, I had to ask our host who was in charge of beautifying the streets. Mr Namik told me it’s the small mayors. Who are the small mayor I asked, and he explained that the small mayors are the ones heading the various major districts that make up Istanbul while the big mayor is in charge of the whole of the city, the only city in the world on two continents. From his explanation I realised that the small mayors are the local government chairmen while the big mayor is the equivalent of a governor. According to him small mayors are in charge of sanitation, tree and flower planting as well as town planning to ensure that drainages are planned along with every new construction and that refuse bins are in the right place and are emptied as and when due.
I was opportune to meet one of these diligent mayors when we visited his office at Eyyup, the most spiritual district of Istanbul. You see Eyyup (Ayyub) was named after Abu Ayyub al Ansari, the famous companion of Prophet Muhammad SAW, who travelled with the first group of companions to spread Islam to Constantinople, but stayed behind to live and die. His tomb is the most prominent monument in Eyyup. Designed along the same lines as the Prophet’s tomb at Madina, Abu Ayyub’s grave also attracts tourists and local pilgrims who come to seek spiritual blessings. The rest of the area hosts a large mosque and an ancient cemetery. Its mayor then was a dimunitive man who nevertheless was full of fire when he spoke. He hosted us to tea, where he invited some agricultural experts to meet and discuss agriculture with my husband. Despite his size, he seemed quite up to the task of keeping an area as big as Eyyup clean and well-planned.
In other places, the authorities actually give incentives to have their cities and towns remain clean. According to the Vice President, Arc. Namadi Sambo, when he visited Media Trust as a governorship aspirant five years ago, in Thailand the government actually pays residents to collect their domestic refuse in order to ensure that the dirt is properly disposed of. The former governor of Kaduna state was responding to a question I put to him on what he will do about street dirt in Kaduna as an architect. He told us about having plans to keep Kaduna clean and gave us the good tidings of a forthcoming new city, his “Little Dubai” to complement the historical town. I do not know what the status of the new city is now.
What is obvious is that no state government can handle our national dirt crisis without the active participation of our little mayors. We have been complaining for long that we don’t even know what the role of our local government councils are because they just seem to meet at month-end to share proceeds from FAAC and the disappear till the next pay day. We now have a reason to call them to account. With the ministry of environment now in collaboration with the senate committee on environment in order to genuinely do something about our environment, we should have a blueprint with which to task our local councils to keep our surroundings clean.
My humble suggestions for this blueprint are as follows:
Declare a state of emergency in the environment sector and entrust local councils with enforcing it.
Empower them with enough funds to hire street cleaners, provide huge refuse bins and ensure regular refuse collection to a designated disposal site
Embark on serious municipal planning exercise to ensure that proper drainages are part of the development of any area from the beginning
Engage in serious media enlightenment exercise to make people realise the importance of keeping their surroundings clean and seeing dirt as an aberration, not the norm
Enact a national sanitation edict which will force all residents to either comply or be punished for breaking sanitation rules nationwide.
