admindrains to contaminated and polluted open areas.
The problem is two-fold.
First a large majority of Zimbabweans see no problem with just dumping their litter in the street. Pedestrians are not quite as bad as motorists, but far too many just drop their empty burger packs, their sweet wrappers and their empty drink cans or bottles at some convenient corner, although a significant minority now do use bins or at least pile their litter on top of the overflow of a bin.
Motorists are far worse. No one can drive even a short distance in Harare without seeing litter, including glass bottles, being dumped from cars. It is considered eccentric to carry a plastic bag in the car for litter that can be dropped off at home when the window will do just as well.
You can even see drivers parking in the Avenues, consuming a takeaway in their car and then just dumping the remains in the street before driving off.
The second problem is a lack of street bins. It is sometimes difficult to find somewhere to dump litter. This does not excuse the litterbugs; they can always carry their litter back to their home or place of work, but it would make life easier and remove feeble excuses for littering.
The Harare City Council obviously thinks more bins are at least a start. They will be enforcing their own by-laws requiring every kombi and every place of business to have a public litter bin. And, no doubt, as this is easy to enforce we will soon see a lot more street bins and bins in kombis.
How easy it will be to use them remains an interesting point. Kombi conductors are not the sort of people who try and be helpful by passing a bin round the bus for garbage, and many passengers might well blanch at having to hand a filthy bin to someone in the back seat.
Businesses might well not over-advertise the exact place where their public bin is kept, and will certainly pull them inside at night.
So more bins is a necessary start to an anti-litter campaign. But it cannot end there. We could have bins every 50m but if no one uses them they are useless.
We hear nonsense that there is a cultural hang-up over carrying litter home or to a bin.
In the old days people just threw their litter into the bush. As that litter was always biodegradable and population densities were low it did not matter how many maize cobs, peanut shells, fruit skins and mango pips were chucked into the veld.
They disappeared in weeks. Polystyrene burger containers, plastic bottles, aluminium cans and plastic bags will be there a decade hence. Even a painted and coated bottle top can take a few years to rust away.
But any visitor to Namibia will notice that cultures in Africa can be anti-litter.
People there simply do not throw stuff into the streets or out of their car windows.
Even drunks will cross a busy highway to dump a beer can in a bin.
And a casual visitor flicking away a cigarette end will find himself gazing into the eyes of an angry old lady and being told: “We don’t do that here.” Well she is right: they don’t. No matter where you go, whatever sort of suburb or, however, remote a road, there is no litter. Street cleaners just get rid of sand, not litter.
It helps that there are bins everywhere in the cities and plenty of bin space at service stations where drivers can offload the remains of their car snacks and empty drink containers. But you get the impression that the anti-litter culture is bottom-up.
There are bins because people want them.
So Harare’s City Council has a long way to go.
Getting bins in place is a start; but the main task will be getting Harare residents to use them.
That will require the major cultural change, and may require some coercion, such as spot fines.
But fining one in a 100 litterbugs, and unless a sea of police swamps the city we will not do more than that, will not be nearly so effective as a serious campaign for people to keep their city litter free. After all, who really wants to live and work in a garbage dump.
Online Reporter