tawandamusarurwa
The Pulse of the Nation
Nick Mangwana
HARARE Metropolitan province has failed to manage litter within its jurisdiction, particularly within the catchment areas of Harare City Council.
This has also caught on in the other urban areas, in what may be dubbed the “rubbish politics” of the country.
Zimbabwe recently experienced an outbreak of cholera, and not for the first time, as citizens had to grapple with the twin problems of poor rubbish management and an inefficient water management system.
Harare cannot be treated as simply another settlement in the country.
It is the capital city.
It has the highest provincial population and is also the administrative capital of the nation.
Most investors come to the country through Harare; deals are stitched mainly through Harare, making the city the face of the nation.
It is the citadel of Zimbabwe’s administrative authority, where virtually every foreign embassy is housed, but it has been allowed to show unabated signs of decay.
Something had to give.
In the face of the local authority dismally failing to step up to the plate, central Government showed decisive leadership.
His Excellency President Mnangagwa declared Harare a state of disaster on waste management, and Statutory Instrument (SI) 140 of 2023 was gazetted.
The accumulating waste dumps in both residential and business areas, indiscriminate dumping and, in some cases, the open and indiscriminate burning of rubbish had to come to an end.
Thus, the President, through the latest SI, authorised the Environmental Management Agency (EMA) to take over the coordination of rubbish management in Harare Metropolitan province.
This would include street-by-street rubbish collection, with sanitary lanes also being covered.
It would also include ensuring that there are bins on the streets and in public areas.
One may ask: Would this be enough?
For nearly five years now, the President has been leading with the monthly National Clean-Up Campaign, which was meant to bring awareness of the rubbish and littering scourge bedevilling the country, as well as the need to take responsibility for one’s trash.
In short, it was meant to curtail the anti-social behaviour of wanton littering.
Maybe the disruption of Covid-19 lockdowns dented the evidential positive response that had started to gain momentum and people reverted to default settings.
Now, with the new Statutory Instrument, EMA has been directed to hold awareness campaigns within Harare Metropolitan province.
This is to include road shows, and radio and television programmes, as well as sector-specific cluster meetings.
Maybe this was the missing link in the chain.
This writer is in full support of the strategy brought in by this current waste management regime, because it has prevention plans embedded in there.
Research has shown that people are more likely to throw trash in areas that are already littered.
This means litter attracts litter.
So, tackling litter through prevention also results in cost saving. You avoid the financial costs of clean-ups.
In Harare, commuter pick-up points are a litter menace.
In some areas, there are no bins.
We have vendors selling their merchandise — which, of course, are either fruits or some food of sorts — in packages for easy carry-on. There is this psychological connection between eating and travelling among our people.
For some strange reason, whoever is travelling has to eat in the process.
But the problem is, nobody feels guilty about throwing the rubbish right where they stand, even if the bin is only 10 metres away.
This is anti-social behaviour and has to be tackled through awareness programmes, as well as peer policing and self-policing programmes.
A research done by one Itai Vincent Tanyanyiwa says that 94 percent of people identify litter as a major environmental problem.
So, if 94 percent of us rightly know that this is a major environmental issue, then who is throwing those take-away boxes from the moving mushikashika?
Who is fly-tipping on all those corners?
Maybe an awareness does not automatically get converted into a call to action.
Tanyanyiwa argues that the availability of information alone remains unlikely to motivate behavioural change.
A person who litters public spaces is rightly called a “litter bug”.
Our country is so full of them.
Some of them are nicely dressed and even drive beautiful cars, but are too posh to take their rubbish home or deposit it in an appropriate receptacle.
The research concluded, among other things, that we have litter bugs in Harare generally because people do not have a sense of ownership.
He says even though areas such as parks are public property (60 percent), people believe someone else — a municipal worker — will clean up after them.
That is a very tragic attitude, where responsibility is psychologically shifted to an unidentified next person, with the first person refusing to take responsibility for their anti-social behaviour.
Dealing with litter may take a raft of measures, but at the centre of it should always be how to change the behaviour of the major stakeholder — the citizen.
It takes both moral suasion and the application of deterrence.
Littering is a habitual behaviour that is hard to refrain from because it is reinforced by
multiple unconscious behavioural mechanisms.
It means the right habitual behaviour should be facilitated and the wrong one disturbed by unconscious norm-activating interventions.
This clearly shows that superficial interventions by EMA, without involving the input of behaviourists, may not shift vexatious attitudes to littering.
That said, we still cannot take surveillance, policing and enforcement off the table.
We have to fine offenders and lock up the obstinate and persistent ones.
Pussy-footing and tiptoeing around such measures will get us nowhere.
A holistic approach to waste management is the panacea.
It will take a change in individual behaviour and serious involvement of the corporate sector as well.
Most of the rubbish that ends up as litter is produced by or used by companies to package their products.
Role of corporates
Packaging plays an important role in more than 99 percent of all traded commodities in one way or another.
Through packaging, goods can be moved as a unit from one place to another.
Whether a commodity is in the form of gas or fine particles, or even cooked food, a layer of some sort that acts as a barrier or for containment is needed.
Sometimes packaging is needed because the item or commodity is hazardous and a hazard to people or the environment.
Corporates still play a role because they either package these commodities or manufacture or sell them.
The choice of material is quite key.
This is where the issue of biodegradable and non-recyclable material comes in.
A powerful way of reducing the environmental impact of packaging is to have no packaging at all.
We have established that disposing of recyclable materials in landfills has a far greater environmental impact than recycling them.
The corporates have to take responsibility for some of the landfills that we have and, therefore, we expect not only a change in their processes and packaging but also a change in their corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes.
In Harare, there was a debate — which has been settled now — over a company that had won the contract to turn the Pomona Landfill into a waste-to-energy project.
All the non-recyclable material that is taken there is used to generate energy and the harmless residue is used to create recreational parks and other sporting arena.
But it has to be collected and taken there first.
This is the part that the Harare City Council has dismally failed ratepayers, and EMA had to be brought in for the next three months.
Within a few weeks of coming in, EMA has already collected 560 tonnes of waste just from the Harare Central Business District (CBD) and some suburbs.
Harare residents are paying rates to council and there is a charge for refuse collection.
But this is not happening.
Before central Government’s intervention, we had vermin and pets infestation at dozens of dumpsites across the city.
Certainly, citizens deserve so much better from the city fathers.
Recently, Harare Mayor Jacob Mafume said they were managing to collect refuse from only 42 percent of households.
The residents shudder to imagine the fate of the rest of the 58 percent of uncollected rubbish.
EMA has to insist on a sustainable waste management plan before handing back to the city its rubbish job.
In 2021, the city was fined $800 000 for failure to collect rubbish, but it seems that did not jolt them into action.
They have already been served with an Environmental Protection Notice for non-refuse collection and failure to remove illegal dumps in Budiriro, Mbare and the CBD.
All these actions failed to propel the city council into action.
They continued to adopt the laissez-faire attitude to environmental issues.
The irresponsibility of the city fathers, litterbugs and corporates is coming with enormous costs to the taxpayer, to the environment and to the beauty of our city, as well as our countryside and along our roads.
The status quo is not an option.
Measures to drive behavioural change such as introducing a digitised deposit return scheme and rewarding sustainable change on the part of companies that manufacture and produce packaging are all remedies that could make a difference, particularly when combined with more substantial fines.
Thus, both moral coercion and moral suasion should be deployed if something is going to shift in a big way.
Nick Mangwana is the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services.
Online Reporter