Residents as well as traders in the capital city of Lusaka are to blame for the filthy state of some trading places and neighbour-hoods, a situation that is a ticking time bomb for waterborne diseases with the current rainy season.
Some areas of Lusaka that include parts of the central business district, Lumumba and Chachacha roads, Kamwala trading area, and some markets across the city are currently a health hazard following the piling up of uncollected garbage and mass littering.
Citizens have called on new local government minister Garry Nkombo and the various local municipalities to take charge and ensure that public places are kept clean to avoid disease outbreaks that will even be more costly to the nation than upscaling the clean up exercises.
A check with the Lusaka City Council – LCC by the Zambian Business Times – ZBT revealed that the council is indeed aware of the piling up of garbage and the resultant public health risks.
LCC admitted that they are facing challenges in managing waste but blamed it on the indiscriminate and illegal dumping, littering and a public which is seemingly not sensitive to the garbage around it.
LCC Public Relations Officer Mwaka Nakweti told ZBT that the Local Authority has been facing challenges with waste management in the central business district – CBD due to indiscriminate disposal of waste by members of the public.
Nakweti confirmed that the cleaning of the CBD is done on a daily basis but the challenge is that waste generators neither want to dumb waste in designated places nor subscribe to have their waste collected, a combination that defeats the daily efforts of the local authority.
She stated that in a bid to bring sanity to the Central Business District (CBD), LCC has placed waste receptacles on islands on Freedom Way, but that it is disheartening however to note that despite the waste receptacles being placed in strategic places, some traders and members of the public still opt to dispose off their waste indiscriminately.
Disposing off of waste indiscriminately and failing to subscribe for waste collection goes against the solid waste regulation and management regulation which mandates waste generators to subscribe for waste management services.
Successive governments and ministers of local government in Zambia have for years struggled to clean up the city of Lusaka. With the change of government and a new minister in Garry Nkombo, many hoped that the situation would be different.
Waste management continues to be one of the biggest challenges facing the city of Lusaka. With the size of waste being generated and indiscriminately dumped continuing to increase annually, there is an urgent need for a long lasting solution.
There was proposal to create a waste management company that would operate as a government agency after a devastating cholera outbreak, but those plans seem to have been shelved and may only be revisited when another waste management related public health pandemic emerges, a clearly re-active than pro-active approach.
With the current above normal rainfall that is being experienced, uncollected garbage is not only blocking the drainages, but also posing unquantified health risk on both surface and underground water pollution.
