dyton mupawaenda
IT is encouraging to note that Harare Mayor, Jacob Mafume, is calling for tougher environmental regulations while urging action against littering and public urination.
While calling for behavioural change among residents, Mayor Mafume repeated the things that environmentalists have been saying all along.
He spoke of people who throw litter outside their cars, eat while walking in the streets and dump waste all over the place.
He also spoke of the need to find a way of managing our informal sector so that they operate from areas where we can manage their impact on the environment.
What was however, interesting is the call to increase fines on people who litter while increasing the work that council is doing in terms of removing litter, separating it and processing it.
The problem of litter in Harare has nothing to do with the level of fines currently in place but lack of will to enforce existing by-laws on littering. Illegal vending is littering on its own and as long as the illegal vendors are operating from undesignated points then litter will always be on the streets.
And, like we have said before, the illegal vendors operating from undesignated points always dump litter all over the place and get away with it.
The second problem is that council is not collecting garbage from communities, including the central business district. The piling of litter on open spaces, especially at the various bus terminuses encourages the public to also throw litter all over the place.
This is an area that council has 100 percent control and can easily be solved if the local authority is committed to managing the scourge of litter in Harare, which at some stage dreamt of attaining Sunshine City status.
Once the public realises that council is committed to cleanliness they will also behave and stop littering. Council simply has to lead by example.
The third problem haunting Harare are the people, who wash cars from parking bays all over the CBD and dumping dirty water all over the place.
This has resulted in stinking roads, especially during the dry season. In most cases these people collect water from burst pipes and use all sorts of detergents.
The city by-laws are very clear on this but no action is being taken to deal with this problem despite the fact that council’s parking officers are always roaming the streets looking for cars to clamp.
So before the mayor worries about the level of fines, the low hanging fruit is eliminating the illegal vendors and illegal car washes from the streets while also collecting garbage religiously.
The problem will go away and it will become easy to enforce the proposed and existing littering fines.
Online Reporter