We are now on the issue of the unsightly environment that has become the lot of our lovable Lagos State in the last couple of months. The last administration, in the light of its own knowledge, sadly took us back to Egypt on this matter of environmental sanitation, and it reminded one of the Otedola era in Lagos when pyramids of refuse sprouted all over the metropolis in 1993.
I remember, as if it were yesterday, that the gory record of environmental degradation then went to Ajegunle in Ajeromi-Ifelodun local council area where the pyramid of refuse on a particular spot there was some 10-storey building high. It was a time when epidemic was at an all-time high in Lagos.
I write of live examples, not of precepts. And I can write and talk about this subject-matter which I know like the lines on my palms. Olagunsoye Oyinlola, an Army colonel at the time, was posted to Lagos as military administrator to stabilise the state from the trauma of June 12 and deal with the menace of refuse that had literally overtaken the state. It was virtually a state of emergency situation we were in.
After the overtures made to party leaders in the state, Alhaji Lateef Jakande chose me to head the refuse redemption team for Mushin, and I strongly suspect that it was the yeoman job I spearheaded that levelled the mountains of refuse in the massive local government area now split to Mushin and Odiolowo, that earned me the chairmanship of the local government from 1994 to 1996.
That Governor Sanwoolu does not want the state to slide back to that 1993 infamy must have informed his speaking out loud that if Lagosians yearned for the restoration of the Saturday environmental sanitation exercise, he would consider reviving it.
I vote for the revival because the mindset of the new governor is evidently clean to permit filth in the life of his administration.
Leave a Reply