Urban Sanitation: Instilling The Missing Culture

Urban sanitation, which entails the provision of waste management services in cities to ensure proper hygiene for the ever-growing population, still seems a luxury to most, if not all, towns in Cameroon. Else, what can explain the filthy nature of the country’s urban areas at the time when others have already won the battle against sanitation and are into redoubling efforts to ensure constant embellishment of their surrounding?
While one would have imagined that hygiene promotion was supposed to be a planned approach to preventing diseases through widespread adoption of safe hygiene practices, the knowledge still seems uncommon to both the population, council and even State authorities charged with ensuring urban cleanliness for healthy cities and lives. This is indeed disturbing!
If one goes by the global notion that urban sanitation begins with, and is built on what local people know, do and want, he may be tempted to think that urban dwellers and managers in the country are either ignorant of what their environment is supposed to be or are simply reckless in keeping it clean. Whereas, it is almost an open secret that how a city plans for sanitation can have a major influence on public health, quality of life, environmental health, disaster resilience, climate outline and much more for decades or even centuries to come.
Those who live in or have visited major cities in Cameroon like Yaounde and Douala would at least agree on one thing: That waste disposal is a serious problem in almost all urban areas across the country. Stockpiles of smelly refuse on the streets, sewage leakages on main roads, haphazard construction and occupation of urban spaces and a lot more vices, are almost the order of the day, especially in the nation’s political capital. It is like a near no-man’s land where people go about just anything from the bad to even the ugly. This is Mindboggling!
Talking about hygiene when cities are reduced to filth has therefore been a very challenging sermon to get assimilated. But since preachers are never tired, Centre Regional Governor has taken the message to councils in Yaounde to strive to give the capital the hygiene it deserves. After holding a sensitisation conclave with council authorities, the Governor has since been crisscrossing the capital city to evaluate the effectiveness of the crusade to keep Yaounde clean. From the various field reports, much ground still remains to be covered in the operation. For, while some are striving to right their wrongs, others appear nonchalant as usual. The result is that the capital city continuous to be a laughingstock in terms of hygiene.
In normal circumstances, should a Governor hold a meeting with municipal authorities for a city, a capital for that matter, to be kept clean? How did we get here that people no longer care about the environment in which they live? That people carry household refuse and dump on the streets? That authorities vested with the powers of ensuring the cleanliness of the city do everything but that! Is the disorderliness and the filthiness of the capital city, like others in the country too, not nauseating to the powers that be? Should we say they have become immune to the dirt to be a point of almost normalising, through their apathy, what brings shame to the country and jeopardises the health of city dwellers? Difficult questions to answer!  
Inasmuch as the Governor’s move remains salutary in the face of the disturbing sanitation problem in the capital city, it must be said that its sustainability remains questionable. It is not the first time songs are sung about the dirty nature of Yaounde and other cities in the country, but the choruses generally die down and sometimes even out when the authority turns to other activities. Difficult to imagine how people and their governing class would want to be policed to keep their surroundings clean. It’s difficult to coerce people to keep their own hygiene. 
It has been observed, regrettably though, that in many parts of the city, there are empty garbage bins, but people prefer to throw their rubbish on the ground. Some areas containing well pasted notices from councils that: “No dirt should be thrown here” are filled with all manner of refuse. People who move on the streets, eat and throw banana, groundnuts and other peelings just anywhere and anyhow, are common scenes in the nation’s metropolis. 
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