Last Thursday morning sections of Georgetown were submerged beneath the steady downpour of the previous night and into the following morning. Some of the rains had accumulated at the corners of Regent and King Streets. People, it appeared, had been caught unawares.
Women and children on their way to work and school were gathering up the hems of their skirts and trousers and were wading through an ankle-deep river. Some of them had removed their shoes, seemingly unmindful of the threat of infection posed by the small islands of garbage that had dislodged themselves from larger heaps dumped indiscriminately in the vicinity and which were drifting aimlessly in the same pool. Not all of the motorists were mindful of the circumstances and the dispersal of water from beneath the wheels of speeding vehicles posed an additional threat to the hapless pedestrians. A handful of King Street businessmen were standing at the entrances to their business places, pondering the conditions, no doubt, contemplating the implications for the day’s trading.
In the course of the day City Hall officials would have mulled the text of a media release on the flooding. Central government would have exempted itself from the situation on the grounds that flooding in the city is a municipal affair. City Hall’s release came eventually, a familiar deadpan pronouncement blaming the floods, in part, on the garbage that had clogged the drains and canals and restrained the flow of the waters and calling on citizens for the umpteenth time to desist from dumping garbage in the city. In essence, it amounted to no more than the discharge of a routine responsibility.
The impotence of a patently weak municipality apart, the dumping of garbage in the city persists for other reasons, not least of which is the seeming failure of government to recognize that the phenomenon amounts to a national disgrace rather than a mere municipal challenge; then there are the business houses that brazenly maintain permanent garbage dumps in the commercial capital without either official sanction or any kind of private sector admonition; the owners of city snackettes and itinerant vendors who simply refuse to take responsibility for the cleanliness and good order of their own immediate environs; contractors who leave their builders waste at or near commercial work sites; and, finally, there are us, ordinary citizens, who nonchalantly discard our plastic soda bottles, cans and assorted food containers on city streets and parapets leaving them to accumulate into unsightly and formidable barriers that block the flow of waterways when these are needed to drain the capital during incessant rains.
In sum, the dumping of garbage in the city reflects both a collective indifference to its appearance and a preparedness to endure the consequential flooding when the rains come. We live by a line of reasoning that treats both the rains and the flooding as inconveniences that will come and go while the piles of rotting garbage no longer give sufficient offence to trigger the kind of collective sense of revulsion or outrage that leads to any attempt at remedial action. Simply put, the dumping of garbage in the capital persists for no other reason than that we have learnt to be tolerant of both the dumping and its consequences.
Why else, one might ask, have measures to eradicate or at least reduce the extent of dumping been limited mostly to City Hall’s routine and largely ignored appeals to the offenders to end the practice? At what point will we finally recognize that the efforts to bring an end to the problem must be attended by firm and resolute official action, underpinned by the rigid and sustained application of legal measures that make examples of the blatant and persistent offenders and significantly increase the risk for those others who persist in the practice?
Some measure of sustained monitoring of the dumpsites in the commercial capital can surely result in a determination of who the routine offenders are. Once such determinations are made the penalties should be sufficiently swift and harsh to serve as a deterrent. Proprietors of city shops and snackettes that generate much of the non-degradable waste that blocks the drains and canals can surely be required to take responsibility for keeping the areas in their immediate vicinities clear of accumulated refuse, again on pain of prosecution; schools and workplaces that attract vendors should impose their own cleanup requirements and vendors who fail to comply should simply be debarred from trading at those locations, and builders who leave their waste behind should simply be hauled before the courts, heavily fined and made to clean up into the bargain. These measures should be supported by rigid monitoring of the waste disposal habits at municipal markets where large quantities of rotting food are disposed of on parapets and in waterways on a daily basis.
It is only when simple measures such as these are put in place and when their enforcement secures the firm and collective backing of both the municipality and central government that the kinds of appeals that are made by City Hall will have any real effect. Threats and appeals that target audiences steeped in and seemingly comfortable with a filthy city and its consequences are unlikely to have any real effect unless these are backed by threats of sanction and, more importantly, a clear and unmistakable demonstration of both a preparedness and a capacity to impose those sanctions. Public education too, which should be applied in support of the various other forms of action, is likely to be far more effective if it is attended by the threat of penalties for failure to comply.
These, of course, cannot be expected to become overnight solutions to a practice that has long been habitual, entrenched and, moreover, one with which we appear to have become ‘comfortable.’ Moreover, they are by no means a panacea for solving the problem of dumping garbage in the city. The fact is, however, that up until now, the response from the municipality has been weak and ineffective and has secured no strong and ongoing support either from central government or from the citizenry as a whole. There is great deal more that we can do together.
