DEAR GOV. AMBODE AND LAWMA

Dear Gov. Ambode and Lawma,

Do you live in Lagos? Can you picture Lagos, August last year and now?

Don’t get me wrong, I think you, Monsieur Governor are doing well e.g. Berger i.e. the entrance of Lagos looks amazing. Back to the main issue.

Lagos stinks!  Lagos is dirty! Haven’t you noticed? Haven't you gone out recently? 

I used to think it was because of the rainy season but it rained last year and the year before that.  Before, when I travelled to other parts of the country, I couldn’t wait to run back to clean Lagos. Now, I wish I didn’t have to leave the house or I lived in some remote village until the rainy season ends. Maybe, it’s just me but the first thing my eyes see is the piles of dirt in front of every house, every street, every road, by the gutters etc. Writing about it, I’m cringing and want to stop writing about it. I have a perpetual frown on my face as I move around Lagos. I see something beautiful and before my eyes can appreciate it, I see a pile of dirt beside it. 

I went to the popular Lagos Island market the other day and right in the market, was a mountain of dirt. It was so high it took over the road; there was just a tiny space for pedestrians to squeeze through. If you’ve been to the market, you know cars don’t pass because of the amount of people on foot. That mountain was over seven feet tall and wide.

Why is Lagos this dirty? Why is the flooding this year worse than last year?

Governor Ambode you stopped the monthly environmental sanitation.

One truth about human beings is that we need, structure, routine, some form of discipline to do things we don’t want to do. Things we’d rather not waste our time doing when we could be catching fun or making money. For example, if the Government here doesn’t recognize Saturdays and Sundays as off days, I’m sure all private sector companies would make their employees work round the clock, seven days a week. This brings me to the importance of that environmental Sanitation that held once every month in Lagos.

Some people say it was stopped because a man sued the government for arresting him on an environmental day even though he had a valid reason to be out whilst the environmental was going on. During environmental, movement is banned, only few people like doctors and what not are free to move around. Note, environmental in Lagos always ended at Ten AM so it wasn’t like it was an all day affair. It was always on a Saturday.

A day before that day everyone becomes conscious that,

“Tomorrow is Environmental day.”

This forces people to sweep the front of their houses, clean the environment, clear the gutters, canals and drainages, cut grasses and weeds, tidy up.

I don’t know if you, Monsieur Governor were trying to make people like you by taking that environmental day away. The environmental sanitation wasn’t a punishment like some people chose to see it. It was a necessity, a necessary evil.

Now, every day, all day, business as usual, no one is taking out time to clean.

There are parts of Lagos that didn’t flood last year but did this year. This year was worse for those areas that flooded last year.  Everywhere was affected: Island and Mainland.

The canals flooded. The amount of people in Lagos (millions of people) who eat, drink, consume everything consumable and live in the state, you need to clean up after that amount of people. Lawma (Lagos State Waste Management Agency) can’t do it alone. The environmental forced the millions of inhabitants to clean up.

Plus as is norm with Government Agencies in this country, the environmental day forced the agencies in charge to know they had to work. Most canals, drainage and gutters haven’t been cleaned for months then the rainy season arrived. The water needed to move, everywhere was blocked, it couldn’t move around and go to where it should so the water stayed on our roads, streets, houses and we were forced to wade, swim, paddle through the stinky murky waters and for some sleep in it.

What is LAWMA doing?

Please was LAWMA also stopped? LAWMA are you on strike? Everywhere you go, dustbins are overflowing, and people are parking dirt on road corners, streets, anywhere they can keep them.

Governor Ambode please bring back the monthly environmental sanitation. The inhabitants of Lagos need it. God forbid a health hazard breaks out; it is going to be a disaster with how dirty the state is now. The rainy season is when LAWMA should work harder. Cleaning up wet dirt is hard.

It is not enough to build infrastructure and plant flowers beautifying the environment if you’d let dirt join in the beautification or is that the plan?

I repeat, people need rules, routine, some form of discipline to force them to do that which they do not like doing.

Please, bring back the monthly Saturday environmental sanitation in Lagos.

Thank you for reading my thoughts.