Lagos unthinks environmental sanitation
Ten years after the last compulsory monthly environmental sanitation progamme in Lagos, the state government has announced its reintroduction as a voluntary programme to tackle the state’s waste collection and
Ten years after the last compulsory monthly environmental sanitation progamme in Lagos, the state government has announced its reintroduction as a voluntary programme to tackle the state's waste collection and disposal crisis. Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu told newsmen last week at the flag-off of the rethought programme along the Mushin-Agege road corridor that it would hold for two hours in the morning and should help to ameliorate the state's waste overload. It is hard to see how that amelioration would occur in the absence of a really scientific rethinking of the waste crisis involving inadequate and badly engineered dumpsites as well as inadequate waste disposal trucks. The governor added that LAWMA trucks would be on ground to evacuate properly bagged waste. The crisis in recent months began in the first instance because the trucks were never enough, and refuse generated from cleared drains and homes managed to reclog opened channels.
When the compulsory environmental sanitation programme began in 1984 in Nigeria under the Muhammadu Buhari military government, the population of Lagos was estimated to be some 3.5m people, up from 2.5m in 1980. By the 2000s, with environmental sanitation still in operation, Lagos had still not grown to 10m people, and it had yet to become the economic powerhouse it has grown to be today at over N60trn from over N50trn in 2024. The state accounts for a quarter of Nigeria's GDP, and is one of the four largest cities in Africa by GDP. From a manageable population of some 10m in the middle 2000s, Lagos has become a megacity at an insane 21m. Either by population size or economy size, it is mystifying that the state plans to depend on voluntary public participation to get Lagos cleaned up and sustained as a healthy, salubrious environment. It is understandable why the governor and Mr Wahab have buckled under the weight of the state's waste paralysis, but to suggest that voluntary participation would produce the right change is too optimistic.
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It is possible the state did its homework to find out why the waste crisis has reached a gargantuan scale, but there is nothing in their solution to suggest they expect it to be a permanent, structured, and seamless solution. In fact, from their statements during the flag-off, they seemed nostalgic about the era when the state was locked down once a month to conduct the clean-up. But those eras are gone, regardless of how effective the Environment commissioner thinks they were in maintaining a clean environment. For obvious reasons, however, those eras cannot be revived. Last November, Mr Wahab himself spoke eloquently about modernising waste collection and disposal using the three-pronged approach of re-engineering dumpsites, creating a circular or recycling economy around waste, and in the interim increasing the number of landfills. What has happened to those ideas? Other great cities and megacities have gone far ahead in managing waste collection, disposal or recycling. Lagos should have modernised along those lines long ago. It should not regress to ancient systems of depending on untenable and unsustainable voluntary participation. There are of course incorrigible members of the public, either homes or commuters, whose undisciplined environmental culture worsens the crisis. Sanitation laws should be drafted and strictly enforced particularly at the local government and ward levels. Sanitary inspectors should be made to their jobs. If houses are fined for environmental abuse, they will not wait for monthly prompting to clean up their surroundings. That should not be difficult.
Simply put, the huge and unsustainable population of Lagos is generating waste far higher and faster than the state has the capacity and resources to evacuate and manage. Will monthly environmental sanitation programme solve this blight? No. Why is waste not being evacuated quickly? The state has a PSP programme to intermediate that process. But there are not enough compactors, not even half the number needed, and the PSP partners are fewer than the state needs. What has Lagos done to secure the services of more PSP partners and procure more compactors? It has not been quite forthcoming. So, even if monthly sanitation is done without the lockdown, the wastes would still not be evacuated, either from interior roads or from cleared drains. Surely, they cannot hope that the public would abandon their private duties to evacuate wastes to poorly managed dumpsites kilometers away.
In 1960, at independence, Lagos was a measly 762,000 people. Today, the state is bursting at the seams with a population in excess of 21m by the most conservative estimates. The state, therefore, has an obligation to ensure that whatever panaceas it develops to tackle the state's developmental or environmental challenges are practicable and well thought-out. The new sanitation programme will soon peter out into nothingness because it is unfit for a megacity. It is too ad hoc to last. If the administration is not careful, it will soon be overwhelmed with refuse far worse than it fears. It should, therefore, go back to the drawing board and find workable, structured, and fitting environmental sanitation models successfully deployed in other parts of the world and adaptable for Lagos use.
