So, the Lagos government stumbled in its waste clearing duties. But should that justify an increasing number of Lagos residents reverting to their state of nature?
Or which 21st century people, except in a state of nature, would blight highway medians with packs of refuse; making fresh piles, as soon as the refuse trucks finish their clearing rounds?
State of nature! On that, literature, the wisdom over the ages, has been rather ambivalent. Yet, the natural state’s sinister side appears more resonant.
Philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (French) and John Locke (English), romanticized man’s pristine “goodness”; and rued the rupture latter-day organized society had inflicted on that utopia.
To Locke, the “law of nature is reason”. Common sense would naturally drive pain-hating humans to maximize their pleasure, and reduce their pain — true.
But the snag is, common sense is not common!
Still, other philosophers have balked. Mozi, of ancient China, talked of each (wo)man strutting with own “morality”. With every person bristling, with own moral supremacy, the collective is doomed.
The English, Thomas Hobbes, was thunderous in his put-down: the state of nature is constant “war of all against all”. Therefore, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Only the Leviathan, the mighty symbol of modern governance, can impose some order on that natural chaos.
In English literature, the Scot, R.M. Ballantyne, in Coral Island, gushed about man’s innate goodness, as a party of three juveniles, marooned by a shipwreck on an island, manifested their best human traits.
But this golden tale was later shattered by a mean one, by the English, William Golding, who in Lord of the Flies, saw absolutely no gold in man’s innate instincts. The British school boys, similarly marooned after a crash-landing, descended into savages.
That was 1958 — 100 years, and two World Wars, after Ballantyne’s 1858 fictional paradise.
Even in psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud spoke of the id, the ego and the super-ego — the id, a function of raw cravings, the psychological equivalent of the state of nature.
But both the ego and super-ego are a function of personal and societal checks, anchored on heavy fear of sanctions; and dire consequences for wrong doings.
Which brings the issue right back to the Lagos scandalous refuse question.
Twenty-first century Lagos appears to have slipped back into the stone-age on refuse culture, leaving Nigeria’s “Centre of Excellence” an environmental blight and a waiting ecological disaster.
It’s time for the Ambode government to wield the big stick, and roll back this shameful atavism.
Until the Lagos government-Visionscape-PSP refuse players crisis, refuse-as-eyesore was almost a thing of the past.
But then came the crisis. Part-paralysis, a logical result from the sudden rupture of hitherto functional, if not efficient, services.
Part-active sabotage — alleged refuse dumping, by some cadres of the warring PSP operators, alleging economic strangulation by Visionscape, the new refuse turf royal.
So, refuse came back with a vengeance — and choice dumps are city-wide road medians. As a result, Lagos groans under hundreds of illegal dumpsites — road medians, roundabouts, junctions.
Even aside from concentrated illegal dumps, a nasty practice is afoot, where people package their refuse, and in the thick of the night, place them by high median concrete barriers, on major roads.
So, the PSP “wartime” tactics — alleged or real — of offloading refuse, bang on the road, is bringing out the beast in Lagos denizens.
Everybody is paying a stiff price: the government in citizen anger and battery; waste managers in increased operational costs; and Lagosians in a debased environment, only a heartbeat from epidemics.
That is the new epidemic in town. It, willy-nilly, has condemned waste managers to gingerly moving their compactors, picking up bags of refuse, every inch of the way!
That’s not all. Street sweepers hitherto limited to sweeping and packing accumulated dust, are rendered useless; at the sight of smelly garbage.
And, the ubiquitous illegal dumps! Even here, at a junction off Fatai Atere Way, across the road from Sterling Bank, in the heart of Matori Industrial Estate, a dump luxuriates, with the occasional pig strolling in, to wallow and feast on the dirt!
In the atavistic language of Victorian Lagos, Prof. Michael Echeruo’s work on the quaint world of aborigines and settlers of 19th century Lagos, that set the city’s cultural temper till this day, Lagos is again going “Fanti” — but on the refuse plane.
Yet, the government would appear at last getting a hang on the refuse crisis. With Visionscape-PSP operators operational cohabitation, regular clearing has resumed.
Though not quite back to the pre-crisis days, the streets could indeed appear clean, particularly immediately after the gangs just finished their clearing rounds. A few days after, however, the roads are clogged again!
That suggests the turnaround time of the clearing gang lags behind the frenetic generation of the refuse. The government should urgently work on that.
The faster the turnaround, the more efficient, more effective and more impactful the exercise would be; and the cleaner Lagos would become.
But even with slower turnaround, the roads are no places to dump refuse.
Even in those pre-2001 days, when Lagos had its notorious mountains of refuse and the city’s essence was filth, nobody dumped packaged garbage on the roads. There were instead refuse outlets — “Ile Ile”, the locals called it in Yoruba — in strategic locations in each locality, where folks took their refuse.
Aside from these congested outlets and untreated dumpsites that rose to become refuse mountains, the only problems was free-wheeling littering, compounded by the absence of street-sweepers — which the Lagos government, as part of its waste management reforms, introduced.
But this new practice of dumping packed garbage on the road, without a care about environmental wellness, is a new low in urban retardation.
That is why the government should not spare anything to stamp it out, before it morphs from the moral epidemic it is now, into a public health epidemic, which the state can ill afford.
The first thing to do is to mount a media enlightenment blitz against the evil, warning of dire sanctions soon to follow it, if not discontinued.
Then, the government should put in place a neighbourhood refuse watch, with specific mandates to ferret out these environmental saboteurs and bring them to justice.
As each dumper is dragged into the net of the law, the punishment should be given maximum publicity.
Then, neighbourhoods should be sensitized to form intelligence units, monitoring and exposing illegal dumping. In return, however, waste managers must scale up their operations, and make waste clearing prompter and more efficient.
Lagos can’t afford the present “state of nature” of dumping refuse just anywhere. The government must play the Leviathan to stamp out the practice.