Vusumuzi Dube
Pathisa Nyathi, Correspondent
IT is early hours of the morning. My mind is active and will not be put to sleep. I imagine many things among which is the much publicised “Big Spring Cleaning” that is running from 1 to 7 October 2023 in Bulawayo. It is time to reflect on the issue that has been given a new lease of attention by the incoming
Mayor for the city, Senator David Coltart.
According to the ancient African calendar in southern Africa the new season starts in September. The cold winter is behind us. Tree buds are bursting into life. Temperatures are soaring. Some cold-bloodied creatures are emerging out of winter hibernation where their metabolic processes operated at the barest minimum. Winter is time of rest for nature.
Taking a walk through the city, one is met with a wafting debilitating and enervating stench of desiccating human excreta and putrid urine showered on the soils within sanitary lanes.
Mountains and mounds of litter are reaching intolerable levels. Cleaning campaigns have been launched before with limited success.
No sooner is litter collected out of sight than it emerges immediately in provocative defiance. All this is happening at a time when the city’s resources to deal with the deteriorating situation are experiencing some serious knock.
The mayor has identified this as his area of priority. A new broom sweeps clean. Does the mayor have a broom? How many share his vision? Only time will tell.
In this short piece I intend bringing to the fore some realities, though painful some of them might be. Environmental cleansing is, in my view, about environmental conservation.
A few weeks ago, I found myself making two presentations on conservation of a natural environment. My thrust was that the hope of attaining conservation hinged upon a well-crafted and meticulously designed conservation ideology.
Ideology spells the path, the methodologies to be pursued as it gives purpose, commitment and the requisite energy to drive a sustainable programme.
In particular, I dwelt on the two concepts of protection and preservation. The former is coercive and relies exclusively on rules, regulations and by-laws.
Local and national legislative councils such as the Bulawayo City Council (BCC) pass and update these from time to time.
There are personnel who may be employed to ensure offenders are brought to book, fined or penalised in one way or the other. A punitive approach is devoid of internal conviction.
I am one person who places a lot of emphasis on the power of internal conviction and self-drive. As a result, I place a great premium on preservation that relies and is dependent upon internal conviction, itself a product of a well thought out education system and the process of socialisation.
Habits taught at a tender age stand a greater chance of perpetuating into old age.
“Litter begins with me. Litter ends with me.” I remembered the late former Vice President John Landa Nkomo when he preached the Gospel of Peace within the context of the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission (NPRC).
The litter that we are correctly worried and concerned about got to where it is largely through human agency.
What one sees as litter may not necessarily be perceived and recognised as such by the next person?
Why do persons that we consider as mad carry a lot of “litter” with and around them?
A clean environment starts in the mind, itself a product of the processes of education and socialisation at a tender age (catch them young), values, traditions and various cultural heritages.
The painful truth is that what we see in the environment is a reflection and mirror image of a community that interacts with that environment.
The environmental conditions that prevail walk in tandem with the residents’ states of mind.
The concept of litter is never universal. We see differently with our mental eyes that relate to and influence the physical eyes.
For action to be taken there has to be, in the mind, some sense of dissatisfaction, disaffection with the status quo.
Where this does not happen with regard to litter, there will be no motivation to expend energy. No action will be taken. We act as we believe. We release energy to remedy a wrong situation, as we believe.
In any case, what is needful is not refuse removal that is never sustainable. The litter should not be in public spaces in the first place.
For that to happen, the young generation should, at a very tender age, be exposed to the right behaviour at household level.
My view on the matter is that while we engage in environmental cleansing, we should simultaneously be innovating strategies that will, in the final analysis, result in litter never getting to the wrong places at the wrong time.
The fruits of such long-term educational strategies are long in coming. I hope that in decades to come those that come after us will reap the fruits of trees that we planted.
My advice to the mayor is to push for firefighting unsustainable, short-term intervention strategies, while simultaneously working tirelessly to introduce longer term and sustainable strategies that seek to change residents’ perceptions of environmental conservation.
These strategies should be informed by existing value systems for the city’s residents, prevailing economic climate and the cultural resources bequeathed on the residents over a long period of lived experiences.
Preservation, rather that protection, should take centre stage. In all this, we should be inculcating a sense of ownership.
Bulawayo is our city and that will release the requisite energy to stop the litter from getting to wrong places in the first instance.
Senses of shame and guilt are stronger than the pain of a sjambok.
Bongani Ndlovu