Lagos State government on Wednesday restated that its quest to enforce all environmental laws in Lagos was not based on wickedness or high handedness.
Speaking while featuring on an X Space programme:, “Ask Lagos Live”, with the topic: “Lagos and the battle for a Clean, Sustainable and Resilient Environment”, Commissioner for the Environment and Water Reaources, Tokunbo Wahab, appealed to residents not to see the enforcement actions from the angle of wickedness but as an essential part of good governance.
According to him, “I want to thank all Lagosians, I will like to also appeal to us to jointly rescue this environment and make it better than we met it for the generations to come. Be rest assured, things are getting better but we will not drop the ball.”
He pledged the readiness of the present administration to continually enforce the state environmental laws on noise pollution, street partying, street trading among others to the benefit of the greater majority of residents.
He added that as part of efforts to sanitize the environment, some offending churches and mosques had been sealed for noise pollution in the last few months because such religious houses could not continue to inconvenient residents with their religious activities.
He said Lagos with its unique topography and smallest landmass housed about 10% of the country’s population and that it experienced the influx of people on daily basis thus putting pressures on its infrastructure including that of the environment.
He said the environment was the master of man and that if everyone chose to treat the environment very well, it would be better for everyone and generations to come adding that with the help of resilient infrastructure in place, the state had been able handle the liquid waste and 13,000 tons of municipal solid waste generated on a daily basis.
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He said waste management was an issue which the state government was tackling headlong with LAWMA, adding that the introduction of PSP operators was a game changer but that the operation had been held down by the refusal of the average residents to pay for the waste he or she generated.
He added that the state government in the last one year had initialed different MOUs with different reputable companies on waste conversion, waste to wealth while efforts were on stream to decommission the major landfill sites in the state.
“We have so much to do, the city is growing daily and most importantly we will keep advocating, advising our friends, neighbours and our families that the drainage system is not a place to put your waste into. It just shows bad behaviour. Let us take ownership of our environment. It will reduce the burden on LAWMA. There are PSP operators everywhere in the state and are ready to cart away our refuse,” he stated.
Wahab said in the past few years the government had been putting in place resilient infrastructure to help discharge the storm water and reduce the issues bordering on flash flooding across the state.
He said some years ago, some individuals chose to deliberately block 156, they made sure it never existed and now they narrowed down on 157 so that perpetually every household around that area got flooded annually whether it’s raining or not.
He added that the government had meetings with home owners, residents and developers at their instance and were given two options – To find a way to deflood the orchid corridor or that all the investment people were making on that corridor would go into waste.
He said the residents had come up with a design that would replace the system 156 that they blocked and widen the width of 157 to discharge more water.
“I was there last week and I commended them that now that you’ve come up with a design yourself and you are funding it. What we did was to help them fund the upper leg of it from government purse while they funded the other one with their design and from the rain that just abated you can attest to it that the flooding around the orchid area wasn’t that much this past rainy season. It’s because of the decision we took.”
He said people should take a look at what was happening in Germany and the whole of Europe, the way flood and flash flooding was taking them down.
“These are countries that have super infrastructures than Lagos,” he said.
He stated that the government could not allow a costal state to be destroyed but would do everything humanly possible to protect the lives of the over 22 million residents.
He explained that the next stage of ban on plastics was the single use plastics for which a moratorium of 12 months would come to an end in January 2025 in addition to the ban of styrofoam food containers which he said was in full effect already.
“For the issue of single use pure water sachets, what the state government has chosen to do is to set up a fund that will be managed by the private sector and government officials and we shall have a buy back of sachets water waste. The policy in place is a global policy,” he said.
He said that the ministry was also ramping up advocacy, awareness and enforcement towards finding a lasting solution to the menace of open defecation and that included setting up enforcement gangs and applying the non-custodial sentences on offenders especially those who might show remorse.
