Harare garbage dumps worse than thought

THE accumulation of garbage and filth in Harare was always known to be bad, hence the need to launch Operation Chenesa Harare at the end of last week to get rid of this major health hazard in the middle of a cholera outbreak, but it has now become obvious it was a lot worse.

The Department of Civil Protection, which is overseeing the large fleet of trucks and earth moving equipment needed to load those trucks, has found a lot more garbage just dumped than anyone had actually accounted for or expected, especially in the southern suburbs with overcrowded Mbare, the home of major produce markets and a lot of informal business, being the worse affected.

So the fleet is being kept in being for a second week so all this filth can be gathered and trucked out to Pomona for efficient disposal and the streets and open spaces can be at least clean with basic hygiene keeping cholera at bay, at least so long as the improved water supply continues and the inflow of rainfed flows down the Manyame and Ruwa Rivers allows Prince Edward water treatment plant to be turned back on.

The major problem now will be keeping the city clean.

Harare City Council is supposed to do this, in fact has the legal obligation to collect all garbage, but the accumulated mounds that are now being removed, and which were far worse than originally thought, showing that the council has not been coping.

One problem is the shortage of garbage trucks, those large compactors, and the poor state of maintenance of many of those still in the fleet.

Last year, the council was complaining that the fleet was only half the size it needed to be. Yet garbage collection is supposed to have a high priority in municipal services.

While the compactor fleet might have been starved, we have not seen any cut back in the purchase of high-end executive transport for senior municipal staff, which may well be part of their compensation packages and so protected by labour law, but which creates an impression that the council is more worried about the cars the bosses drive than about the specialised vehicles needed to keep the flood of garbage at bay.

There are many other reasons for the council being overwhelmed in garbage collection, and a lot of that comes from residents.

Some is not the fault of any particular resident, just the continuous growth in population and so the continuous growth in garbage. Everyone produces at least a minimum amount of garbage every day and needs to get rid of it.

Densities are rising everywhere so there is more garbage produced in every street and in every city block and in every suburb, simply because there are more people living there, yet the calculations done on how many cubic metres are likely to be collected are worked on historical records which do not really make sense any more.

In addition, over the years, each person produces more now on average than they would have done say even 20 years ago, let alone more than 50 years ago when the then greater Harare was unified into a single local authority with a single department for collecting garbage and a single fleet of vehicles.

There is more and more plastic packaging, with the old paper bags and paper wrappings that at least decomposed now very rare. Everything is in a plastic bag these days, and that mounts up.

There is more pre-processed food around, so the leftovers and waste do not rot down into compost but rather rot down into slime in garbage heaps.

The days when most families, even on very small plots, would run a compost heap in a corner of their stand so they could fortify their garden soil and grow some vegetables are long past. Now everything is just thrown away and dumped.

Finally a lot of residents simply do not pay their bills, and the council is rather bad at enforcing payments, so the garbage department has been known to run short of diesel, let alone the trucks to put the fuel in.

The distances each truck has to drive, over bad roads, is also increasing, with the Pomona dump almost as far as possible in the city from the major population centres and thus the major sources of garbage.

Yet despite all these problems the municipality must now make a determined effort to maintain the cleared state of the city. This will require a lot of backing from residents.

For a start, when one of those illegal dumps is restarted, and they will be restarted as people just dump garbage willy-nilly, those most affected, the people living next door to the dump, must immediately complain, and should try and take a few photographs of the dumping on their phones.

The council could set up a hotline where these photos and warnings are sent. Once a few people have been prosecuted for illegal dumping, and it is an offence, perhaps others might think again.

Some have already suggested that householders could do more to sort their garbage and see what can be recycled.

Even, as one person suggested, extracting the organic garbage, the stuff that rots easily, and burying it in a modest hole on your stand would help, as well as pulling out for decomposition the garbage most likely to harbour germs.

This in some ways would a return to those compost heaps that were once ubiquitous.

Other garbage could at least be crushed and tightly and neatly packed in bags.

Harare City Council once used to issue a heavy-duty and reusable plastic bag to every household, which helped contain the garbage until the truck came round.

Now people pile it in any old box or set of small bags, so it spreads. And then it is piled up loosely, and then it does not fit into the truck and gets left, and then a new illegal dump starts.

We can all take a deep breath and pack our own garbage in our own yard and deliver it to the truck when it comes.

Areas like the vegetable markets and the retail vendor markets where vegetables are sold need to have far more attention paid to their largely organic garbage.

It should in fact be possible at these markets to have properly managed composting facilities, and that compost could even be sold back to farmers, since after all they are returning with an empty truck.

And the council must be prepared to shout for help if it looks as if it is not managing. Early warning will at least prevent huge new piles forming, and a modest surplus can be quickly taken away and steps taken to educate residents on how to better manage the flow of garbage from their own houses onwards.

Operation Chenesa Harare is doing a great and needed job, but it cannot be the regular way to shift garbage. That requires a far more determined effort from residents and the council.