Osun’s Changing Environment

[Shola Sholaz]

I Have lived through several administrations since the creation of OsunState and none has had the sort of visible impact that this man has had in so short a time.
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Perhaps what makes the difference is that no governor before him has approached the issue of the environment from a deliberate policy perspective as he is doing. He has developed a coherent policy on the environment, with a focus on health, which he has been implementing since he took office.
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Previously the situation in Osun was characterised by heaps of refuse everywhere, resulting from people uncaringly dumping waste in any open spaces they deemed suitable for that purpose – on roadsides and road median, in streams and rivers and just about anywhere. Another prominent feature of the landscape was the ubiquitous markets that opportunistically sprang up everywhere, with their enormous capacity for generating garbage. It needs little emphasis that we have had to live with the resultant untoward health implication, and we actually lived through the flooding consequent upon silting and blocking of waterways by refuse. Flood-occasioned destruction of lives and properties is one of my most enduring recollections of the reign of the last administration in the state.
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Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, on assumption of office, declared a state of emergency in environmental sanitation, with his O'Clean programme aimed at ridding our environment of filth and getting the people to have a change of attitude in the way they treat the environment. The 90-day emergency period saw a mandatory weekly sanitation exercise in Osun and the weekly cleaning of markets and places of work. This is strengthened by the daily street cleaning exercise by the O'YES volunteers.
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Obviously, ridding the streets of garbage heaps requires a waste management policy. The government of Ogbeni  Aregbesola is no less impressive in this area. Besides getting the people to clean up and gather their refuse, collection and clearing of rubbish have been a fruitful. partnership between government and private waste collectors who charge fees, but go into the inner streets where government trucks cannot reach. And there is the fee-free government alternative, but which requires taking one's refuse to designated collection points for onward evacuation to landfill sites for processing. The green-painted garbage trucks – and I've seen scores of them – with their peculiar honk are now a part of our daily morning traffic in Osun. The waste management is aimed at achieving an integrated system that will comprise transfer-loading-stations in all the local government areas of the state, from where the refuse would then be carted away to the central landfill site. Recycling facilities that are still under construction are a component of the system. These facilities, meant to enable the re-use of plastic waste, are to be complemented by a buyback scheme for plastic waste for a more effective control of the hazards constituted by plastic bottles and pure water sachets.