LASG MOVES TO SANITISE IDI-ARABA

The Lagos State Government has held a meeting with residents and stakeholders in Idi-Araba area of the State as part of efforts to restore a clean and healthy environment.

Speaking at the meeting held on Tuesday in Alausa, the State Commissioner for the Environment, Mr. Babatunde Durosinmi-Etti said that the Idi-Araba Community had suffered from series of environmental abuse which could pose serious hazards to members of the community if unchecked.

He said that the State government’s intervention in the community, as well as many other local communities, was informed by the desire to protect the well-being of the people by preventing the outbreak of epidemics, adding that flagrant abuse of the environment often led to the pollution of water sources, cholera and other communicable diseases.

He noted that stakeholders in communities were crucial to the attainment of a clean, livable environment as they were not only the sources of waste and environmental nuisance but also critical factors in sanitation and waste management.

His words: “The signal that we are sending with our strategy of involving community stakeholders, who are actually the waste generators, is that waste management is a collective responsibility”.

“For instance, you can see that we need to harmonise issues of enforcement and protection of sanitation workers with the people and enlist the support of members of the community, particularly in areas notorious for demanding money from refuse trucks or where sanitation workers are being denied access to the streets out of sheer hooliganism”, he said.

Durosinmi-Etti revealed that the cleaning of Idi-Araba is in collaboration with stakeholders such as the Chapel of the Healing Cross, Sterling Bank, Access Bank and Zenith Bank as well as the Yoruba and Hausa Communities, adding that volunteers, who would collaborate for enforcement and sanitation purposes, would be drawn from all segments of the Idi-Araba community.

To address behavioural issues, he said that the Advocacy Unit of the Environmental Services Department of the Ministry had been mandated to reach out and train members of the community on appropriate waste disposal methods in order to sustain the ongoing efforts to sanitise the area.

The Commissioner emphasised that stakeholders’ involvement in the Idi-Araba clean-up, as well as in other parts of the State such as Apapa and Ifako-Ijaiye, was important in the implementation of environmental sanitation plans and programmes of the Lagos State Government.