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| Heaps of garbage line the banks of the Msimbazi River where it meets Morogoro Road near Jangwani in Dar es Salaam. |
MAYBE you have been traveling in the city by bus. You really do no not see much of a city traveling that way. Still, even by bus you are likely to see heaps of waste somewhere by the roadside.
In some homes loads of waste are buried everywhere in the homestead till the whole compound is pregnant with it. In Dar, however, you really see the dirty side of the city when you travel by train.
The commuter trains, which began meandering their paths in the city, a couple of years ago, pass mostly in some of its darkest corners. And in Dar es Salaam, the darker or the remotest the part of the city the bigger the more attractive it is to be a dump.
As the train runs in these parts of the city, you observe rubbish you would never imagine existed in such a city - the nation’s capital. It appears the rail is a big dump of the city where everybody can dump all sorts of waste as they will. All along the railway line from the city centre to its well out of town terminus, dumps dot the way.
The common type of waste in the heaps is the thin, black plastic bag. This kind of waste and the other kind, a bag known to most city inhabitants as Rambo, fill the dumps. Residents of the city use Rambo and other plastic bags in various ways, which is the hardest kind of pollutant to eliminate. I once saw a black plastic bag lying by the roadside. It looked rather stuffed, but so harmless.
I gave it a kick to send it farther away from the road. But I had kicked it a little too hard and punctured it. My foot sank into a mass of human waste- faeces. The black plastic bag has become a mobile toilet for all loafers!
It also serves well girls who want to hide their aborted fetus and carries a couple of other blacker evils with it. Plastic bottle too are quite a bother, but serve many a young men as a urinary. Heaps of waste harbouring it compound harms that come with it.
If I remember right, earlier this year the government announced that by June this year it should not be seen. June has come and is running to its end, but the thin plastic bags and other types particularly the black one are still there. An expert report says: “Plastic bags cause many minor and major issues in geographical terms. The most general issue with plastic bags is the amount of waste produced.
Many plastic bags end up on streets and are aesthetically displeasing. “Even when disposed of properly, they take many years to decompose and break down, generating large amounts of garbage over long periods of time. If not disposed of properly the bags can pollute waterways, clog sewers and have been found in oceans affecting the habitat of animals and marine creatures.”
Whereas the continual presence of plastic bags is a product of mere disobedience of the law and the state’s order, there are many factors contributing to lack of quick waste disposal.
One of them and the basic one at that is poor planning of the city. Indeed it is lack of planning! It is said that only 15 per cent of the Dar city is planned. The rest remains in haphazard construction of houses.
The result is lack of passage for vehicles to waste collection points, which consequently remain inaccessible and cause waste compilation. The narrow roads, which are resultant of poor planning or lack of it for that matter, cause congestion of traffic and delay a quick removal of waste. Waste trucks cannot make many trips necessary for complete clearance of waste heaps, hence long presence of waste at the collection centres.
But the city’s poor planning despite its inconveniences, is benefitting some people. Indeed it is a good number of them, who profit from the lack of passage ways where there ought to be a road.
Since many people cannot reach their houses by road, they cannot as a result keep their cars at home. Instead they park them overnight at some centre for a pay. Prayer premises and such places as the ruling party office premises have made the most of this poor planning of the city. These institutions have built enclosures in their premises for cars safekeeping at night.
For one vehicle they charge 5,000 to 10,000/- even more a night, depending on the size of the vehicle. However, heaps of waste anywhere in the country tells a lot about our performance and responsibility.
Earlier this year the government made yet another call to producers and users of plastic bags to change or desist from making or using them. Will they? In the spotlight mostly are plastic bags of lightweight which, de facto, have previously been prohibited. Their producers were ordered to stop producing them and sellers to stop their sales, to no avail.
Our country seems to be the dumping wild land for other nations. Their used cars, used shoes, old spoons, underwears, kitchenwares and hand-medown clothes are dumped here for a little price to undercut local producers. It is a business which has stagnated the growth of our industries. The government has just acted against phony phones. Once, the problem of ghost workers was surely ghostly.
The government literally has destroyed it. Our health depends largely on the purity of our environment. Species in it are a valuable natural resource. The Indian black crow has posed quite a threat there. The biggest excuse to destroy the aerial native of India has been lack of funds to buy the poison.
Basically though, corruption has been at the core of this fight. Can we succeed in the fight with Indian house crow- corvus splendens? The previous government often said it had no money to buy the deadly poison to the intelligent bird.
We expect that the fifth-phase government of Dr John Pombe Magufuli - a keen and efficient collector of taxes, has the necessary funds to buy the 3-chloro- ptoluidine hyrochloride, DRC-1339 or Starlicide a deadly poison to kill the intelligent bird and consign it to oblivion.
In some homes loads of waste are buried everywhere in the homestead till the whole compound is pregnant with it. In Dar, however, you really see the dirty side of the city when you travel by train.
The commuter trains, which began meandering their paths in the city, a couple of years ago, pass mostly in some of its darkest corners. And in Dar es Salaam, the darker or the remotest the part of the city the bigger the more attractive it is to be a dump.
As the train runs in these parts of the city, you observe rubbish you would never imagine existed in such a city - the nation’s capital. It appears the rail is a big dump of the city where everybody can dump all sorts of waste as they will. All along the railway line from the city centre to its well out of town terminus, dumps dot the way.
The common type of waste in the heaps is the thin, black plastic bag. This kind of waste and the other kind, a bag known to most city inhabitants as Rambo, fill the dumps. Residents of the city use Rambo and other plastic bags in various ways, which is the hardest kind of pollutant to eliminate. I once saw a black plastic bag lying by the roadside. It looked rather stuffed, but so harmless.
I gave it a kick to send it farther away from the road. But I had kicked it a little too hard and punctured it. My foot sank into a mass of human waste- faeces. The black plastic bag has become a mobile toilet for all loafers!
It also serves well girls who want to hide their aborted fetus and carries a couple of other blacker evils with it. Plastic bottle too are quite a bother, but serve many a young men as a urinary. Heaps of waste harbouring it compound harms that come with it.
If I remember right, earlier this year the government announced that by June this year it should not be seen. June has come and is running to its end, but the thin plastic bags and other types particularly the black one are still there. An expert report says: “Plastic bags cause many minor and major issues in geographical terms. The most general issue with plastic bags is the amount of waste produced.
Many plastic bags end up on streets and are aesthetically displeasing. “Even when disposed of properly, they take many years to decompose and break down, generating large amounts of garbage over long periods of time. If not disposed of properly the bags can pollute waterways, clog sewers and have been found in oceans affecting the habitat of animals and marine creatures.”
Whereas the continual presence of plastic bags is a product of mere disobedience of the law and the state’s order, there are many factors contributing to lack of quick waste disposal.
One of them and the basic one at that is poor planning of the city. Indeed it is lack of planning! It is said that only 15 per cent of the Dar city is planned. The rest remains in haphazard construction of houses.
The result is lack of passage for vehicles to waste collection points, which consequently remain inaccessible and cause waste compilation. The narrow roads, which are resultant of poor planning or lack of it for that matter, cause congestion of traffic and delay a quick removal of waste. Waste trucks cannot make many trips necessary for complete clearance of waste heaps, hence long presence of waste at the collection centres.
But the city’s poor planning despite its inconveniences, is benefitting some people. Indeed it is a good number of them, who profit from the lack of passage ways where there ought to be a road.
Since many people cannot reach their houses by road, they cannot as a result keep their cars at home. Instead they park them overnight at some centre for a pay. Prayer premises and such places as the ruling party office premises have made the most of this poor planning of the city. These institutions have built enclosures in their premises for cars safekeeping at night.
For one vehicle they charge 5,000 to 10,000/- even more a night, depending on the size of the vehicle. However, heaps of waste anywhere in the country tells a lot about our performance and responsibility.
Earlier this year the government made yet another call to producers and users of plastic bags to change or desist from making or using them. Will they? In the spotlight mostly are plastic bags of lightweight which, de facto, have previously been prohibited. Their producers were ordered to stop producing them and sellers to stop their sales, to no avail.
Our country seems to be the dumping wild land for other nations. Their used cars, used shoes, old spoons, underwears, kitchenwares and hand-medown clothes are dumped here for a little price to undercut local producers. It is a business which has stagnated the growth of our industries. The government has just acted against phony phones. Once, the problem of ghost workers was surely ghostly.
The government literally has destroyed it. Our health depends largely on the purity of our environment. Species in it are a valuable natural resource. The Indian black crow has posed quite a threat there. The biggest excuse to destroy the aerial native of India has been lack of funds to buy the poison.
Basically though, corruption has been at the core of this fight. Can we succeed in the fight with Indian house crow- corvus splendens? The previous government often said it had no money to buy the deadly poison to the intelligent bird.
We expect that the fifth-phase government of Dr John Pombe Magufuli - a keen and efficient collector of taxes, has the necessary funds to buy the 3-chloro- ptoluidine hyrochloride, DRC-1339 or Starlicide a deadly poison to kill the intelligent bird and consign it to oblivion.
