Trash everywhere but Nigerians are hungry

THE austerity currently ravaging our nation is no hallucination…it is whistled by the wind, causing trees to sway in apprehension. It spells the waters and they lie still, listless while it places an embargo on the soil’s fertility, making it compact.

There is palpable hunger in the land. The pang of its whip is felt by not only the commoners but the supposed uptown girls as well – this was evident in Moremi Ojudu’s recent lamentations. By the way, she is the daughter of one of President Muhammadu Buhari’s special advisers, but I would not delve into the intricacies of her blatant rebuke today.

The lives of millions of Nigerians are at stake and the government seems to be bereft of any good idea that will cushion the effect of this self-inflicted economic higgledy piggledy. The prices of food stuffs continue to sky rocket on the premise of an arithmetically progressing inflation rate. However, as the recession bites harder and the people scream louder, the piles of trash littering the streets in major cities and smaller ones go higher.

Why am I talking about hunger and mentioning trash? Why am I speaking of food and connecting it to wastes? There may be no correlation in both terms based on the context but before you crucify me upside down, be patient enough to finish this journey with me.

Waste management remains one of the greatest problems facing the nations of the world, and Nigeria, like several other countries, is yet to find a sustainable waste disposal method till date.

With a population of over 180 million that has a steady growth rate, urbanisation and industrialisation, including globalisation, the challenge of solid waste management in the country gets more complex with the breaking of each dawn.

Waste generation is on a geometric increase in Nigeria due to the wrong attitude of waste generators among other reasons. Though there is paucity of data on waste generation and composition in a country afflicted by poor documentation and information management, the following is the waste generation rate of some major cities as observed as far back as 2009: Lagos State, with a population of over eight million in 2009, had a waste generation rate of 255,556 tonnes per month. Kano, Nigeria’s commercial city, generated 155,676 tonnes of solid waste monthly in 2009 with a population of over three million. Ibadan, Africa’s largest city, had in 2009, a waste generation rate of 135,391 tonnage monthly and Onitsha generated 84,137 tonnes of waste monthly. That was over half a dozen years ago.

More recently, in 2012, statistics showed that the rate of waste generation in Lagos and Kano became 9000 and 3849 tonnes per day respectively. Imagine what statistics will say at the end of 2016?

Hence, the significance our national method of municipal waste disposal to the hunger Nigerians are currently experiencing will become clear within the next few paragraphs.

In December 2011, Mexico City shut down its infamous land fill, the very large Bordo Poniente landfill site, which was receiving 12,600 tonnes of waste per day.

So since shutting down the landfill did not keep the city from churning out trash, the local government had to launch several measures to reduce the waste created by the inhabitants of the city.

That birthed the Mercado de Trueque, Mexico’s barter market. In March 2012, a new barter market in Mexico City that is meant to help residents trade their trash for food in an effort to reduce the mountain of waste produced by the mega city was inaugurated. It also became an instant hit with residents of the city.

Imagine that you get food to feed your family for turning in trash! Every resident of the mega city became a waste collector because trash had been transmogrified to food. They didn’t see the heaps of trash as disgusting anymore; they saw them as meal tickets and they were! For residents who brought along recyclable wastes exchanged them for vouchers (“puntos verdes”, or green points) that could be used at nearby farmers markets to purchase food.

According to reports by the city’s media in 2012, more than 3,000 families brought almost 11 tonnes of recyclable waste on the market’s opening day.

Today, it pops up on the second Sunday of the month at locations across the capital and attracts more than 4,000 people. They exchange an average of 15 tonnes of waste every month – from paper, glass and cardboard, to plastic bottles, aluminium cans and small electrical appliances.

What a smart way to manage waste right? However, the most interesting thing is not the waste management. It is the social, economic and environmental benefits of the Mexico barter market. As well as recycling more waste, it raises awareness of the problem and need for a better recycling culture. The scheme also incentivises people to buy fresh, locally grown food. This helps boost the local agricultural economy and generates both public and private-sector jobs (for example, in food production and waste collection) – a much-needed shot in the arm in a city where a quarter of a million people are unemployed.

I envy the people of Mexico City and you should. What smart government they have! Imagine all myriad of economic problems that would be eradicated in Nigeria if we just had government that actually thought things through?

It was a local government initiative! We have self acclaimed professionals throwing big grammars into the air but who does their grammar help?

Where are those proverbial thinking caps? I bet in Nigeria, they are extinct!

Just imagine a barter market in Ibadan for instance… with the piles of trash lying around fallow in the big city. Imagine how life will be… not only will the waste be properly disposed, agriculture will thrive. Yes, more people will go into farming because they would want to become distributors for the government. The hunger will cease. The sprawling population of beggars and area boys will drastically reduce when they know they can pick up trash and convert it to food.

Imagine a barter market in Kano, Onitsha, Lagos… wouldn’t life be better?

An enterprising market like the one in Mexico City, typifies the kind of imaginative thinking required to move a nation forward. While in Mexico they say that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, here, in Nigeria, we remain hungry.