It is tough waking up someone pretending to be asleep. That said, I’d urge you to consider the catastrophic environmental degradation occurring along the Odo Iya Alaro waterway. The situation - a systematic failure in waste management - demands immediate intervention to avoid a public health crisis.
The Odo Iya Alaro Wastewater Treatment Plant, constructed at a supposed N5.2 billion in 2014, is operating far below acceptable standards, conducting only preliminary treatment before discharging dangerous effluent directly into our waterways.
Multiple sewage discharge points exist along the canal, from Awolowo Road in Ikeja through Maryland and down to Iddo Terminal, where tanker operators openly dump raw sewage into channels flowing directly to the Lagos Lagoon.
The intended centralized sewage treatment plant near Ojota, despite receiving 60% mobilization payment, remains abandoned after multiple false starts.
Scientific analysis confirms alarming levels of heavy metals (lead, cadmium, chromium) and dangerous pathogens (E. coli, salmonella, shigella) in local water sources, posing immediate health risks to surrounding communities. In fact according to a report by the FIJ, residents of Olatunji Street, Kujore, Victoria, and Cele Emmanuel report regular illness, foul odors, and flooding that brings sewage-laden silt directly into their homes.
Therefore, I recommend the following more specific immediate interventions:
1)Declare an environmental emergency for the Odo Iya Alaro waterway and surrounding communities.
2) Fund and implement proper primary, secondary, and tertiary treatment processes at the existing treatment plant to meet international standards.
3) Initiate comprehensive dredging of the entire waterways to remove accumulated waste sediments, overgrown weeds to restore water flow.
4)Immediately stop all raw sewage discharges at Iddo, Maryland, and other unauthorized locations, with strict penalties for violators.
5)Complete the centralized sewage treatment plant near Ojota with proper oversight and accountability mechanisms.
6) Conduct free health assessments in collaboration with local government for residents in affected communities with appropriate treatment for waterborne illnesses.
7) Establish a dedicated task force to enforce wastewater management standards with regular monitoring of treatment facilities.
Beyond the simplistic approach of uploading videos of citizens dumping refuse, improving the environment in Lagos requires deep thinking, well thought out policies and collective action. However, it appears the Honorable Commissioner seems more occupied with uploading content, most of which are often divisive and malicious.
#ourlagos
Mr. Wahab,
Impact is felt, not explained in 1,578 words.
Your plastic policy has failed.
Your environmental policy, if one truly exists, has been ineffective.
Your waste management policy has been an unmitigated disaster.
The only area where you have consistently delivered is the demolition of the hard earned properties and livelihoods of ordinary citizens.
Not to mention your Bigotry and Gaslighting.
You have lost the moral authority to remain in office.
You should resign.
Today.
Peter Obi at The Mother of Christ Hospital Enugu, today where he donated N10M to help them renovate parts of their building destroyed by fire.
Nigeria will be okay ✌️🇳🇬
Your Excellency, unsurprisingly, this statement is an admission of failure, not a solution.
Lagosians do not need periodic emergency evacuations of mountains of refuse. What they need is a functional waste management system that prevents waste from accumulating in the first place.
For years, residents have endured overflowing dumps, uncollected refuse, blocked drainage channels, and worsening environmental conditions despite billions of naira allocated to environmental management.
The fact that you now have to “direct an immediate scale-up” after waste has already overwhelmed communities is an utter failure of leadership.
Indeed, Lagos generates over 13,000 tonnes of waste daily today, just as it did yesterday, last month, and last year. This is not a surprise. It is a known reality that should be planned for through efficient collection, waste sorting, recycling infrastructure, transfer stations, waste-to-energy investments, and transparent performance management of operators.
Like your commissioner, you cannot continue to shift responsibility to citizens to “bag their waste properly” when many communities are left without reliable and affordable waste collection services. Rightly, Citizens have a responsibility to dispose of waste properly, but government has an even greater responsibility to provide the infrastructure and systems that make proper disposal possible.
Lagos cannot continue operating reactive clean-up exercises and public relations statements whenever refuse piles become impossible to ignore.
Lagos deserves a modern, accountable, and sustainable waste management system: one that measures success not by the number of trucks deployed after a crisis, but by the absence of the crisis itself.
Again, Your Excellency, after seven years in office, why is Lagos still battling a problem that should have been solved through competent planning, execution, and oversight?
I guess the answer is obvious: if e didn’t dey, e didn’t dey.
#OURLAGOS
I’m 61, and not yet in active retirement.
3 years from now, my last child will depart for college.
At that juncture, the inimitable Iyom Electrik (aka “Fine Girl”, “Odogwu nwanyi”), and I will have a choice to make; and it will be a binary choice.
1) Return to our Estate in Anam and build the largest fish farm in Igboland. Farming and writing philosophical treatises.
But this choice carries a contingency; a dramatic improvement in security. If this fails to materialize, we will deed the Estate over to the Catholic Church to repurpose as a high school.
2) Buy a Villa or Finca in Andalusia or Porto, somewhere along the Duoro River. Immersing ourselves in the culture and farming and writing philosophical treatises.
One seeks a life of humble obscurity. Nature, music, poetry, lyricism and knowledge in contradistinction to monumentality, and power. For indeed, “Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas," ("Happy is the one who has been able to understand the causes of things").
Many friends and colleagues, amongst them plausibly the nation’s best and brightest, called it quits years ago. Seeking freedom from the oppression of a sunken place. Camus was right. A life so close to the wall is a dog’s life.
Their surrogates are the politicians and the purblind “elite” or moneyed peasants; encrustations of barnacle and weed upon the underbelly of the Leviathan, the Nigerian State. The lower forms of life, long seized control of a benighted people. A genus that turns the suffering of the average Nigerian into spectacle.
The people themselves chained in a dark, underground Plato’s cave and looking straight ahead at a blank stone wall and nourished on an infernal diet of tribalism and religion, are caught between passivity and complicity. They are no bargain. Their suffering is not redemptive.
And the intellectuals? The enablers. “Everywhere belle face”.
Time they say, is a precious thing. And I have always liked the dictum: “Time is a fugitive”*
So you see dear Nigerians, I am a candidate in this election. Vote wisely.
* (Literal, the Latin, “Tempus fugit”)