The Government of Nigeria is committed to promoting sanitation and hygiene, along with drinking water. Towards this end, it has formulated policies and strategies from time to time. Some of these policies are i) National Water Supply and Sanitation Policy, 2000, ii) National Environmental Sanitation Policy, 2005, iii) National Health Promotion Policy, 2006 and iv) Strategy for Scaling up Rural Sanitation and Hygiene to meet MDG, 2007.
A time plan for implementing the proposed road map has been prepared. The various time lines suggested are, state of preparedness and period of transition (2016-2017), assessment (2018), years of consolidation and moving forward (2019-2021), year of self-assessment (2022) and the ûnal assault (2023-2025). Open Defecation Free Road Map—Federal Government
Recent revelations about the way Nigerians ‘ease themselves’ seems to have hit the government in the face. Nobody, not even the World Bank or the UNICEF seems to have bothered about where Nigerians urinate. Yet, this is important for the health of the nation. But global organisations have, understandably, paid so much attention to what in local parlance is captured as ‘doing the big one.’ Put bluntly, about 50 million Nigerians defecate in the open. Should our federation be certified (as it has been) the second largest culprit in the social crime of open defecation, 58 years after independence?
As problematic as British colonialism in Nigeria might have been, the colonialists made efforts to introduce the modern toilet system to Nigeria during their administration of the country. When the British first arrived in Nigeria, they themselves used the out-house model of freeing themselves from engaging in open defecation, a model that many communities in urban parts of Ondo, Ekiti, Osun, Ogun, Oyo, and Lagos copied. It must, therefore, be shameful to those who grew up in many of these areas in the 1940s to learn that all of them, except Lagos, have regressed, now having over 40% of their population in the category of open defecators.
At the time the British were leaving in 1960, the model of modern sanitation had become known to their political successors. Some of the first-generation post-colonial rulers made efforts to popularise modern sanitation. For example, Awolowo established a toilet bowl and ceramic bathtub factory in Abeokuta, to make access to such products more affordable than imported products. What happened to that political will over time? At that time, the one-station radio distributed to most homes in the region engaged in aggressive promotion of sanitation and hygiene, including hiring of Sanitation Inspectors to private homes in the urban and semi-urban parts of Western Nigeria. It is such political will that has been deficient for several decades, to the extent that the entire country slipped back into a sanitation culture that has embarrassed the civilised world. That truck drivers parking on bridges in Lagos today engage in open defecation brings the problem into sharp focus and calls, among other embarrassing conduct in most parts of the country for the kind of comprehensive solution in the ODF Roadmap published in 2017 under the Buhari administration but based on studies and policy discussions done under Goodluck Jonathan in 2014, a sign of productive use of Hand-Over Notes from one government to the another.
It is instructive that all the country’s governors need to go to Abia State for tutelage on sanitation and hygiene, apart from reading the new textbook on sanitation by the federal government; Open Defecation Free Road Map. But the ‘Wonder Child’ of Nigeria in terms of response to sincere and effective intervention by government agencies and the UNICEF since 2013 has been Yakurr Local Government in Cross River State, which has been certified as the first open defecation-free community in the federation. The significance of the progress in Abia with just 1.7 percent of its population engaged in open defecation and of Yakurr LGA in Cross River becoming a national model of modern Sanitation & Hygiene is the validation of the old cliché, “Where there is a will, there is a way.”
The Guardian’s story on the Yakurr experiment on improving sanitation is apt for all states and local governments: “A report of the re-validation of certified ODF communities in Yakurr LGA of Cross River State by NTGS released December 2017 concluded: “All the issues that were identified in the field were tackled using the small immediate doable actions (SIDA) approach, which addressed all the issues. A sustainability plan has been drawn at the LGA for sustaining the ODF Status by the LGA. The LGA staff pledged their support and commitment to sustaining their new status. The clan heads also promised to use their offices to sustain the status and to strife to achieve total sanitation in the shortest possible time. Everyone was commended for their various contributions leading to the 100 per cent success of the programme in Yakurr.”
Open Defecation Free Roadmap is by all standards a well-prepared policy document. This is not surprising, given the experience and expertise of agencies involved in its formulation: UNICEF, DFiD, European Commission, NAFDAC, and representatives of several ministries, ranging from Health, Agriculture, Environment, to Water Resources. The diversity of perspectives of those involved in preparation of the policy to meet SDG 6: “Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all” captures the interlocking nature of the problem at hand. The policy document also illustrates ambitiousness of the government, particularly its commitment to meeting SDG 6 five years ahead of 2030.
But a policy paper can also remain a rhetorical document if the will to move it from the page to the stage of implementation is not pursued with sincerity and vigour. The history of efforts towards reducing or ending open defecation in the country since 2000, referred to in the first passage in the opening of this piece, shows that several policy documents must have been allowed to die a natural death. Otherwise, there would have been no reason to create a new roadmap to solve a problem that had been on the policy table for the past 18 or more years. But the comprehensive policy of 2017 is better late than never.
Given that it has taken the federal government four years to turn a concept conceived in 2014 into a policy direction, it is conceivable that achieving the goals by 2025 will require unfailing implementation in the next seven years. And the bulk of the time needed to meet this specific Sustainable Development Goal will take place under the next federal government. It will be necessary for the current government to make the new document available on its website. All political parties seeking to rule the country from 2019 need to be exposed to this important document. Doing so will enable all presidential candidates to present their positions on a policy to end a cultural practice that is self-demeaning. It is already axiomatic that handlers of Buhari’s campaign for 2019 will not leave this matter out of their mission, having spent three years on producing such a remarkable policy monograph.
For lack of a better phrasing, ODF Roadmap 2017 is a form of cultural restructuring. It must not be made optional to any president and political party that comes to power in 2019. It is whichever party that comes to power in 2019 that will have the opportunity to make or break implementation of the laudable goal that is currently only a promise to Nigerians and other countries committed to improving quality of life in the entire world.