The filthy commercial city of Blantyre

It might be a cliché to continue blaming local government authorities for uncurbed waste spills in the country’s cities, but the busy town of Limbe is becoming filthier by the day.

In fact, the commercial capital’s age-old business hub cuts a figure of no-human’s land as sights of filth near shops and on the roadside become common place.

A noon stroll around the city is an encounter with garbage that should have been cleared weeks earlier. Passengers carelessly throw sugar cane residues on the pavement. Empty street-pole bins stand like sickening islands amid rising reeks of litter. Plastic papers fly about as shopkeepers whirl fistfuls and cartonfuls onto the street. Broken sewers add a stench to the stale air that welcome the mass of humanity every day.

Tired with the worsening situation, a trader of Asian origin rightly ranted in an interview: “The town looks like a dumpsite with garbage making life difficult for businesspeople. These ugly sights scare away customers who require a clean business environment.”

According to the businessperson and neighbouring shopkeepers, they had been waiting for garbage collectors for almost a week when the bin finally tumbled into its spillovers. To them, the city council would seem to have no regard for the town and its neighbouring settlements where bins and waste bags are piling on gates, awaiting the day they will emerge from their holiday.

In its messy standings, Limbe is strikingly a tale of two worlds. On one hand are citizens seemingly seeing nothing wrong with littering the streets, a group of pedestrians and motorists hurling the packaging and remains of their buys anyhow. On the other are city authorities often accused of lacking capacity.

“I bought sugar cane because I am hungry. I cannot delay my hunger until I get home or near a stinking bin,” said Angelo Namondwe, a Bangwe Township resident who was spotted littering as he ate sugar cane near Robert Mugabe Highway.

His response presumes that buying gives him a right to litter, yet it is an example of unbecoming tendencies that once turned the road into a carpet of garbage and compelled former president Bakili Muluzi to call a spade by its name.

“This is unacceptable,” said Muluzi in April last year: “Malawians, let’s love our country by dumping waste in designated places.”

Muluzi’s appeal may not have catalysed the desired change of mindset, but the law and its enforcers are not helping matters either.

Ironically, the decried garbage sites are mushrooming just four months after the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Management effected a polluter-pays principle and outlawed thin plastic bags on February 21.

The polluter-pays principle is in line with the Environmental Management Act which makes responsible waste disposal a must. Section 42 requires anyone who pollutes the environment to cleanup, remove and throw them in designated places. The law also stipulates fines ranging from K20 000 to K1 million for non-compliance.

Worryingly, even those that are keen to place garbage in rightful dumpsites, skips and bins witness them burst out of control or being tipped into rivers because garbage collectors are failing to do their job.

It is becoming old-fashioned for city councils to blame their failure to live up to public expectation on the shortage of garbage collection vehicles and skips that has been plaguing them for years.

Faced with a long-standing question of garbage mounds at Chikapa Market in Machinjiri Township, Blantyre City Council director of health and social services Dr Emanuel Kanjunjunju said: “We have mounted bins and skips across the city, but [people] still throw waste on the ground—even dead animals.”

Spot checks along major roads in Limbe showed no skip, only street-side bins full of unclassified litter.

Kanjunjunju blamed the Chikapa situation on vendors’ failure to pay market fees, but sellers in Limbe say they pay. They wonder why garbage collectors seem long-coming when revenue collectors visit them all day-long on daily basis.

In Limbe, both uncollected and wantonly disposed litter ends in Mudi River which requires about K9 million to clean up its stinky, greenish waters.

Last December, BCC’s environmental health officer Patrick Chapweteka admitted that the council has failed to manage waste.

“We have limited resources that do not enable us to maintain the existing structures like waste collection vehicles which are already inadequate to manage the whole city of Blantyre,” said Chapweteka.

Yet, this is not surprising in a country where pollution like that of Mudi River usually ends with a ministerial talk show resembling what Blantyre City West Member of Parliament Tarcizio Gowelo told Parliament in March: “Government must punish heavily people who pollute rivers and other undesignated spaces.”

Behind decades of tough talk is the failure to invest in proper waste management in the country which has no purpose-built dumpsites. In the meantime, cities have to do with pits and excavations left behind by road construction companies.

Mirroring the country’s failure to invest in such vital services as waste management, Malawi News Agency (Mana) reports that the curse of uncollected refuse in major cities will be eased following a pledge by the City of Yokohama, Japan, to donate the much-needed refuse collection vehicles.

According to Mana, Yokohama promised to donate the trucks along with ambulances, fire engines and water purification machines in response to President Joyce Banda’s request when its mayor paid a courtesy call on her.

But the situation in Limbe could be a reminder that rather than relying on donations to safeguard the well-being of its people, government must take the mantle of responsibility and start giving waste management its deserved status and funding.