‘How We Tackle Waste Management'

Ipalibo Harry

– Ipalibo Harry, Special Adviser to the Rivers State Governor on Environmental Matters

By Lawson Heyford , Port Harcourt

How was it at the beginning?

I have been involved in environmental activities before I got appointed as chairman of the Rivers State Sanitation Authority. I am the Special Adviser to the governor on environmental matters. My duty covers advising the governor on environmental matters, at least in the local environment. Other areas include gas flaring, pipe- line vandalisation, solid waste management, gaseous emission and the rest of them. Waste management in our urban centres seems to be a measure of the performance of any governor. People tend to ask, how well is the state performing? Test indices can be inferred from the state of cleanliness of our cities, and because His Excellency is conscious of this, that informed my being drafted to the sanitation authority as chairman. The work has been very peculiar and very challenging, but exciting to me as it is challenging.

The waste generation capacity of the state is very, very high because population is increasing as urbanisation grows. As rural settings began to grow to maturity and to urban level, waste generation increases. Port Harcourt city alone generates as much as 6,000 metric tonnes of waste everyday.

What is the present state of affairs in the Authority?

We are contending with the problems of general refuse management. The waste generation capacity of the state is very, very high because population is increasing as urbanisation grows. As rural settings began to grow to maturity and to urban level, waste generation increases. Port Harcourt city alone generates as much as 6,000 metric tonnes of waste everyday. A lot of people would contend with me over this, but I tell you, I know that because more than 120 trucks get to the dumpsites everyday, and if you put that together, it can't be less than 6,000 metric tonnes of waste. Even if it is 3,000 metric tonnes of waste, it is enormous, it is huge. We have not begun to look at the need to recycle some of the things that we don't need again, so everything is seen as waste. You know Port Harcourt is growing, so how do we begin to manage these before it becomes too much of a problem?. Road decongestion is part of the assignment. That is why the sanitation authority is there. You see, the tankers carrying maybe asphalt or whatever, even products for the filling stations they always break down and that can cause a lot of trouble and if not immediately handled or taken away from there, sometimes it can catch fire and a lot of things can happen, so we don't normally allow them there for long. If you have a broken down vehicle, and you want to fix it, don't do it on the road, take it to the side and fix, so that keeps us on our toes all the time.

The other area that has taken so much of time are dead bodies on the streets. Before now, we used to have corpses lying everywhere, particularly between 2004/2005 when we had increased militant activities. You saw bodies at every spot and that is the duty of the local government to remove them. But His Excellency said stop that, they were not doing it properly and we don't need to wait for them, and that job was given to me; of course, it has always been the job of the sanitation authority. So we began to carry dead bodies off the streets, so that they don't decay there. It is unhygienic and the law of sanitation would not allow us to allow bodies to decay around. Often times, it is my job to go round and get them whenever we get a call; we cannot be ubiquitous. But, whenever we are informed of a dead body anywhere, we move into action and get in touch with policemen to move them. I will tell you, we move them not to the mortuary, but to the burial ground. At that point, they become a waste, they are not identified, they are not collected, and they are not owned by anybody. So we take them, do proper formalities and bury them. That way we have successfully rid our state of decomposing bodies. And lots of other things call for our activities, so many road sweepers are often-times knocked down by vehicles. These are (road sweepers) hired by the sanitation authority and their job is to come out and sweep the streets every morning and if necessary, in the afternoon or evening. They have been doing that and we have more than 600 of them, mostly women, to help keep the city clean. That is not to say we are done with our jobs. Refuse contractors, 16 of them, are the same contractors who have been given the assignment to bring out dirt from the drains, they bring them out and cart them away. Unfortunately, every now and then, we are constructing new roads in government and every new road as a matter of policy goes with drains these days. If you observe, every new road goes with a drain, every new road constructed goes with two and at least one side drain and that includes the length and breath of drain. We have to do that to avoid urban flooding, because you know the nature of our state, it is a flood plane. It is a plane area and the topography does not help us. So we have to do something to get some water away from the city centre. Unfortunately, because of the state of our population, the urban areas where water used to find their ways out to the Ntanwagba or the Abonnema wharf creek or wherever, people have put up structures across them. So the water finds it difficult to find its way to the outlet and that is the major problem we have. But to a very large extent, at least so far we have not observed any major flooding.

What plans, if any, does your Authority have to encourage people to get involved in waste-to-wealth conversion?

In fact, our attitude to waste is low as it is, but I don't know if you remember, two, three years back, the word waste itself was strange to our people. It was hardly used, even by media practitioners. That waste is coming in or is being used is seen as a new thing, people have begun to see waste rather than refuse, formerly called refuse or dirt. When we talk about waste-to-wealth, we talk about waste management. Recycling is a major issue in waste management, but recycling does not come on its own, it starts from somewhere. Firstly, from our homes, waste segregation as we call it. Sorting of waste from your house begins by isolating different components of waste. Chemical waste is the most hazardous category of waste we have and every thing goes together, wrapped in and thrown away and they all find their way to the dump site and you all know, oftentimes we get reluctant getting the public to know the exact implications of these things. Waste is wealth. But not all waste can give you wealth. Some are degradable and some are non-degradable. So we are talking about non-degradable waste. How do we get them? On the part of government, I tell you: if you go to the new Abonnema dumpsite, you will see that the structure is now used to accommodate the different categories of waste. Right now, we are going to engage some of these scavengers, employ them on the part of government.

How do you intend sensitising people to embrace sanitation and see waste as wealth?

We have a policy on environmental sanitation. It was my mandate to bring it to bear before the National Policy on Environmental Sanitation came into existence. So, I am sure when the Federal Government brought in the national sanitation policy, they had in mind, of course, all states minus one, that were not committed to environmental sanitation. We have gone far ahead of all the things that were set out by this policy, the national policy. Refuse as only one kind of waste is only refers to household waste. Waste has gone beyond household , we have electronic waste, that are very very dangerous. Last year, we generated about the highest, in terms of revenue for the Authority compared to every other regime in this state, about N26million. To manage our own waste by ourselves we either dig the ground to bury or burn them. The other way is to throw such refuse into the river. We are saying no , we certainly would collect them, government would manage it on everybody's behalf and so far is spending N1.2 billion annually. Because people are not ready to pay, they look at it as government, not individual's responsibility, that is the problem. So, we say okay, maybe we should make the pollutants also responsible for waste management whereby government takes 60 per cent of the burden. So if what is required to cart away refuse is N1.2 billion, government takes about N750 million from the public and expects the public to generate about N450 million. We had to adopt all manners of approaches, what we called military. So this year, we resolved to take away that military approach and appoint a consultant to handle this, and you are now asked to go to the bank and pay directly. Everybody goes to the bank and pay his or her money after filling the bank's teller.