Keeping Our Environment Clean: Play Your Part

There is this saying that cleanliness is next to holiness, whether or not we believe it, at least we all can agree that cleanliness is good for our health as humans.

I was driving back from church on a particular Sunday this year, it rained and what i saw is what moved me to write this particular piece. The rain started, and in a matter of minutes, everywhere was flooded. As a typical Nigerian, i already started hurling insults at the leaders, for lack of proper drainage and maintenance of the ones we have. This mind set however changed in a matter of minutes. what i saw was just dis heartening, i saw all forms of refuse floating in the flood, refuse that will never decompose, refuse made of polythene and plastic. Then i asked my self, “Is it the Government that is responsible for this”, Your answer is as good as mine.

As i drove further, i saw people emptying their trash cans into the flood, like the water was going to take the refuse to the appropriate dump site. The saddest part was that just across the road, was a very big trash can by LAWMA. All they had to do was pour the garbage into the can, but no: our way of thinking, our mindset in this part of the world is just pathetic and unrefined.

When there is a flood, we all are quick to blame the government, and most of the time, we fail to look inwards. Using Lagos state as a case study, i can confidently say that the Govt has put in a lot of effort in terms of man power and equipment in place, to make the state clean. But really, all this will be a futile effort, if we the people do not make the effort to keep our environment clean.

– Do you dispose the trash from you house properly?

– When you are in your vehicles, do you buy stuffs on the road, and throw the trash out of your car?

– Do you make use of trash cans when in public places?

All these and more are questions we need to ask our selves. we might say how does that piece of pure water nylon cause any harm, but imagine 5 million of us doing it, the results are more severe than we tend to often see. When a drainage is blocked, when a canal has no free flow of water, and it rains heavily, the outcome sometimes are fatal. People have died from floods, many of which could have been avoided, if only we take it on ourselves that we want to keep our environment clean.

Here are a few tips to ensure and guide us in keeping our environment clean

1. When disposing refuse in our homes or offices, ensure that the garbage is neatly tied up in a waste bag, before putting it out on the street to be collected by the necessary waste disposal agency.

2. Stop throwing stuffs on the road, keep them in your bag till you locate a garbage or trash can. We can’t keep throwing nylons and bottles on the road and expect our environment to be clean

3. Take part in sanitation, clean your environment from time to time. Not the kind of sanitation majority of us do, the kind that we empty the gutter in our neighborhoods, and leave the garbage at the edge of the gutter, then when it rains again, it washes it back into that same gutter.

4. when in public places, always ensure to use trash cans available, and when not available, keep the trash in your bag or pocket and dispose it when you find a trash can. I try to do that a lot, it works.

Keeping our environment clean is a collective responsibility, we are all involved. Are you helping to keep it clean or helping to keep it dirty?