Azore Opio
4 September 2008
opinion
Cameroonians have become extremely hostile to land and his own surrounding. Buea, Mutengene, Tiko, for example, are not pretty sights anymore than they were, say, a decade ago.
Rubbish, nothing but rubbish everywhere. Although men and women who reside in these towns may dress dazzlingly to kill, and pretend that they are smart; they and their buildings and their surroundings are smeared with rubbish.
You will find not drums, but heaps of filth smouldering and oozing depending on the mood of the weather. You will find gutters filled with flies happily buzzing on mounds of rotting fruit peels and vegetables.
But then among all this brutal garbage there is the invincible plastic (wrapping) and broken bottles, rusty tins. Every inch of ground surrounding residential areas is buried in plastics. Muck, dust, disease, filth, rot, and plastics!
Our towns are submerged in them. Ugliness now grins so implacably behind what were once beauty. The first thing that government should do, since it pretends to run the affairs of the public, is to educate its own workers, whether directly concerned with waste disposal or not.
In good turn, they will educate the public. Government should also encourage local firms to dispose of or even recycle both domestic and industrial wastes; their effects on health and the hazards caused by improper transforming of organic waste into manure.
The government should mobilse its services such as MINEF, councils, Agriculture, Health, Town Planning, schools and the entire population to dispose of and recycle wastes in their various genres: plastics, glass, aluminium, iron and organic wastes.
But this requires selfless commitment on the part of government. Afterwards, the public would be able and willing to dispose of its wastes in a non-hazardous manner. Local firms will be collecting waste street by street, creating employment at the same time and the cleanliness of homes and streets shall greatly improve the health of everybody.
At the same time, farmers shall improve and conserve soil. This will also improve their yields with the use of natural manure not chemical fertilisers that are considered harmful to human health.
Improved yields shall generate more income and a clean environment shall curb the breeding of mosquitoes, thus reducing significantly the incidence of malaria. All these shall guarantee a more habitable environment and healthy living.
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