By Umu Thoronka in Makeni
September 19, 2020, (SALONE TIMES)
FREETOWN – Residents of Makeni have strongly criticized the Makeni City Council (MCC) over what they described as the council’s inability to efficiently manage waste within the municipality as they were doing before now.
These ‘Makenians’ made this call after some of the communities were becoming eyesore with filth littered by their compatriots while the council too turned blind eyes to the menace.
During random interviews conducted by Salone Times, Josephine Kanu who resides at the Ropolon community said that Makeni was losing it accolades as the cleanest city in the country. This, according to Josephine is because the MCC is beginning to exercise some form of fatigue in not just the collection of garbage but as well as the cleaning of the municipality as per their legal mandate.
Josephine explained that before the re-introduction of the Monthly general cleaning, Makeni was the only city that used to observe monthly cleaning on its own and that helped in no uncertain terms to keep the city clean but ever since the Bio led government announced the monthly cleaning and coupled by the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, things began to take a downward trend.
She disclosed that communities will now clean their environment and pile up the garbage in bags with the idea that MCC will come around to collect them like they had been doing but after several days without them showing up, some unpatriotic citizens will dump them back into the gutters especially when it rains during night hours. This in turn will cause the gutters to overflow due to blockages.
“This community is on the receiving end of the filth thrown into the gutters. This is affecting us badly most of our gutters haven blocked and flooding is what we now pray against. Let me also use this medium to advise those engaged in littering the gutter to desist from that uncalled-for act” Josephine advised
Another interviewee who described himself as Ibrahim Mansaray added that the garbage collection is ineffective because it has been monetized. Ibrahim added that they as community people are required to register and pay certain amount of money which he said is not a problem but their concern is them not getting the services they paying for.
Even here, we will place our garbage in bags expecting the council officials to pick them up, but to no avail. And when it rains, you will see those bags containing filths rolling down the gutters and sometimes causing blockage resulting to flooding of house and the streets.
Ibrahim Mansaray noted that the council never negates on their collections of taxes, city rate and licenses but how they use that money remains a mystery.
In his response, the Information and Education Officer of MCC; Emmanuel Y. Samura said that collection of waste is their normal activity which is ongoing. He added that they were quite aware of the challenges they being faced including accessing certain communities due to bad road networks and the rapid expansion of the city. Though the current waste management project they are executing brought in additional machinery, but still that is not enough.
He said they have shared the Makeni City into 5 zones and MCC is in charge of the Central Business District while the other areas are in the hands of youth groups for cleaning. To benefit from the second limb, one has to register and pay some amount of money and if you are not complying, you won’t benefit. He explained that taxes paid are meant for collection of garbage but if one does not want to pay, he or she should locate the nearest skip container to dump their waste. He added that part of the money collected go towards the rehabilitation of feeder roads and they work in collaboration with the Road maintenance Funds, and as well as addressing emerging issues within the municipality.
According to the IEC man, before the Maada Bio led government, they used to do general cleaning on every last Saturday of the month but this stopped when a national cleaning exercise was re-introduced. Also, due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the said national cleaning has been halted and councils including the MCC no longer do national cleanings. He said the MCC at the moment only collect garbage. He said they used to have a project supported by RMF to clean all the canals within the municipality but for the past two years, that project ceased been supported.
He emphasized that Council has Bye-laws that prohibit people from littering the gutters including when it rains and that laws will be invoked to stop indiscriminate littering of the city. He retorted that despite the fact that litters are seen in what he described as the few places, that does mean that Makeni will lose the accolades as being the cleanest city in the country.
