By Mabinty M Kamara
The city of Freetown is becoming notorious for indiscriminate garbage disposal. There is garbage all around the place, from back of school fences to market places, and even in cemeteries.
This has got some concerned citizens worried, prompting a debate on who is to be held responsible for the situation.
The Freetown City Council (FCC) is mandated by law to ensure the city is clean, but it is currently doing so through an intermediary, a privately run cleaning company called Masada, which it has accused of incompetence.
At Dove Cut Market, otherwise known as Guards Street Market, everyday a huge number of people from across the city meet to buy and sell. Here, as in other markets around the city, they sell all kind of food items, even cooked ones, ready for consumption. The unhygienic environment makes for a constant threat of diseases.
Many of the people who spoke to Politico hold the FCC responsible for the situation.
“All they care about is just to collect market dues from us...They don’t want to know whether the place is clean or dirty or whether we have toilet facilities and some of us do come here with our children,” lamented Mabinty Conteh, a vegetable seller at Dove Cut.
But the city council blames the traders in part for the filth in the market and said only a change of behavior could help address it.
Along Black Hall Road, also in the east end of the city, there was a pile of garbage at the back of the Sierra Leone Muslim Brother Hood Primary School, near Benz Garage. From the look of things the place is slowly turning into a dump site as the pile of garbage increases by the day.
Sulaiman Zainu Parker, Environmental Officer at the FCC, told Politico that Masada’s inability to overcome challenges it faced was also a major factor. Parker said for the last two months the Council had embarked on a weekly cleansing exercise, usually on Sundays, to make up for Masada’s failure to measure up.
“But all our efforts are being frustrated by the very traders that are complaining about the issue because they even sometimes use the drainage system as toilet. So they need to change their behaviors in that regard,” he said.
Mr Parker said the Council had put some mechanisms in place to ensure that the sanitary condition of market places were hygienic.
“We have been having regular meetings and discussions with Masada to see to the garbage [situation] in the city. But it seems they alone can’t do it. So to complement their efforts, the city council’s standby team will come out and join in the cleaning of the city,” Parker said.
He added: “We have trained some youths who live within the community of the markets to be helping us in undertaking the cleaning exercise regularly in the evening hours after business has closed. And we have regular meetings with those youths to ensure that they do the work effectively.”
Masada Energy International-SL, LLC, is a subsidiary of the United States-based Masada Resource Group, a provider of proven and environmentally friendly technology solutions. It has developed a pipeline of international waste-to-energy projects to deploy these waste technology solutions on a commercial scale. In Sierra Leone, the company first started working with the government in the cleaning of Freetown in 2012.
Some reports have put the deal at an estimated $300m, involving collection, management, and conversion of municipal solid and liquid waste into renewable fuels. It also includes the construction of an ultra modern processing plant. It was estimated that about 400 tons of solid and liquid waste per year was to be converted into ethanol.
For now, the concern is whether Masada has what it takes to clean the streets, rather than its ability to meet its long term plan of converting the waste. Some of the challenges the company now faces include lack of vehicles and equipment necessary to do their work.
Parker, who once headed the defunct Freetown Waste Management, which was discarded to make way for Masada, said the latter was selected to take up the project after a comprehensive bidding process involving about 8 companies. He said at the time of awarding the contract Masada’s bid indicated it had all it would take to do the job.
“It is clear that Masada cannot handle the situation and we are looking at ways to solve this problem, said Cyrill Mattia, Public Relations Officer of the FCC.
With the rainy season at the corner, flooding is sure to add to the problems of Freetown. Irregular disposal of garbage during down pours often leave gutters blocked.
Mattia, in an earlier interview, has hinted at the possibility of splitting the responsibility of Masada, thereby allocating cleaning to a third party.
Parker also warned that the city authorities will take action against residents who engage in the “reckless and unpatriotic behavior” of dumping garbage in gutters and other forbidden locations. He said a municipal court had already been established about a month ago, designed to prosecute defaulters on the basis of the city Council’s bylaws.
“Since the establishment of this court thirty cases have been tried so far and the fines levied on defaulters range from Le200, 000 to le500, 000 or a period of two month imprisonment or in some cases both fines and imprisonment,” the FCC Environmental Officer said.
But some residents are already skeptical about the implementation of the bye-laws.
“They are not going to implement it for long. If it even lasts for two weeks then we should thank God,” said Osman Jalloh, a trader who sells outside the Anni Walsh Memorial School gate.
“They started this thing [some] years back; when people were about getting used to the idea it stopped.”
Right in front of the school gate a small pile of garbage has begun rising. Jalloh and others around the school fear it would soon metamorphose into a dump site if immediate action wasn’t taken.
Parker assured that this time round the laws would be enforced to the letter. He said they couldn’t pursue previous operations because of the non-existence of the municipal court.
“We have patrol teams that comprise sanitary officers and metropolitan police who will monitor and bring culprits to book. And the law covers the reckless disposal of any kind of garbage, maintenance of toilet facilities and drainages and a host of other offences which is termed as statutory nuisance offences; that is why we are engaging on a lot of sensitization,” he explained.
Efforts to reach Masada officials for comment proved futile.
(C) Politico 21/06/16
