adminhideous attitudes most Zimbabweans have when it comes to dumping fast-food containers, drink cans, and biscuit boxes.
Africa Unity Square every morning is cleared by the city sweepers. And a few hours later, after lunch, is a sea of litter. People walk down the street munching a burger, and just dump the box.
Possibly the worse are those in cars who think their windows are slots in a dustbin and just hurl their rubbish onto the road, preferably outside someone else’s house.
No one can say this is the “African way”.
In the old days, when everything was biodegradable, throwing a maize cob into the bush was hardly littering. Densities were low and the ants destroyed the cob in a few days.
But living in a large city is a modern phenomenon for almost all people in almost all cultures; and we have all adapted to other big city needs like the ones to cross roads carefully, use bathrooms rather than rivers, and keep our handbags zipped.
So why can’t we add putting litter into bins to that list. We all do so at home and work, so why not in public.
There are African cities that do not have a litter problem.
Perhaps at the top of the list are Namibian cities and towns. There is never litter in these. The only people who try and drop litter are tourists, and they are immediately accosted by imperious Namibian ladies who make it clear that “we do not do that here”, and shamefaced tourists then pick it up and put it in a bin.
You can even see drunks on Namibian streets staggering across the road to put their bottle tops in a bin while they carefully clutch the just-opened beer bottle.
Namibian cities might have to hire street sweepers, but these are people who carefully brush away the wind-blown sand, the country is in a desert after all. There simply is no rubbish to sweep away.
Several Zimbabwean cities and towns are a lot cleaner than Harare. Bulawayo has always been tidier, if dustier and drier.
It does not require a major effort to carry food containers and the like to a bin, or even to carry them home in our cars, or take them back to out offices.
Admittedly Harare could do with a lot more bins.
An effort has been made in the eastern “up-market” half of the central business district, with small bins on the old parking meter pillars.
But far more could be done. Surely a standard large bin could be produced and businesses asked to each sponsor some, with their name and advertising on it of course.
Many of these bins might need protection at night, when it seems vagrants set fire to the contents, but several large takeaways already have a good design for a sealed bin that they wheel inside the shop at night.
Municipal police could be deployed, and given authority to write tickets, to make litter-bugs pick up their rubbish, only issuing a ticket if they refused.
We do not want to go as far as Singapore, where stiff fines of US$100 are dished out for dropping a match stick. But our present “don’t care” attitude is too far the other way.
Ticketing should be a last resort; having clean streets is the aim.
And meanwhile we need public campaigns so that, like Namibia, “we don’t do that here”.
After all everyone has now been to school and schools are pretty keen on litter-free environments. We were all taught not to dump our sandwich wrappers or sweet papers or anything else in the school grounds, so there really is no excuse.
Online Reporter