Wale Aboyade's thesis - lumes

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Akinwale Aboyade, LUMES Thesis, 2003/2004 3 Status of MSW management and Energy and Climate Change policy in Nigeria Here the materials and data collected from interviews, government reports and personal observations from field visits are presented in a descriptive form. 3.1 MSW Management in Lagos, Nigeria This section gives a brief description of MSW management in Nigeria. 3.1.1 Brief history The Nigerian Government included in its National Policy for the Environment (1989 p.22) that solid waste must be collected and disposed of in effective and environmentally safe manners. The Lagos State Government has similar policies Bamgbose et al, 2000), but despite such policies, at federal and state levels, the waste problems still persists and is most obvious in the larger cities. Lagos clrealy is the best example of this Rapid industrialization and urbanization in Lagos combined with decades of poor governance and poor administration at all levels has contributed to the poor state of MSW management in Lagos today. In 1977 the Lagos State Waste Disposal Board (LSWDB) was formed with the mandate to collect and dispose solid waste from commercial and residential sources. The actual operations were contracted out to a foreign company, Messrs. P.D. Pollution Control of England and paid for 100% by the state government (Odunaiya, 2001). This development brought marked improvements in MSW management of Lagos state which hitherto was decentralized between the various local government areas that made up the metropolis. However, the improvements could not be sustained because the rapidly increasing population coupled with increasing corruption and administrative ineffectiveness, led to rising costs which the states budget could no longer adequately fund. P.D. Pollution Control’s contract with LSWDB expired in 1985 and was not renewed, perhaps because of the change in government that year. Successive municipal leaders, in trying to impress residents, would temporarily inject funds into the LSWDB aimed at short term measures usually to reduce the littered waste and improve aesthetics, measures that couldn’t be sustained because of the aforementioned reasons. In 1988, with the help of a World Bank loan, LSWDB was able to acquire equipment such as compactors, loaders, excavators and so on. The loan was also used in the construction of the Olusosun landfill. The LSWDB itself was reorganized in a bid to commercialize its operations into the Lagos State Waste Management Authority (Bamgbose et al, 2000). Not surprisingly, the performance of LAWMA was no better than its predecessor and it was later decentralized and Local councils again became responsible for collection of domestic MSW. Still the institutional arrangement was fraught with a lack of coordination between relevant units, difficulties in revenue collection. The existing framework now is such that LAWMA is jointly managed by the sanitation units of both local government councils and State government through its Ministry of Environment. The Lagos State sanitation law of 1998 had provided legal backing to LAWMA until 2000 when a bill with the same title was passed by the state house of assembly. According to the Law, LAWMA is charged with the collection and disposal of industrial and commercial waste as well as management of landfill sites and management of transfer loading stations (Odunaiya, 2001) 22
Akinwale Aboyade, LUMES Thesis, 2003/2004 3.1.2 Waste generation characteristics According to Bamgbose et al (2000) reported the World bank contracted Lavalin Incorporated, a Canadian firm in 1999 to carry out an assessment study of waste composition and generation rates in Nigeria in 1992. The study showed that 70% of total waste generated in Lagos was from domestic sources and the rest from industry. There have also been a few other studies on waste composition in Lagos (see Table 3.2) Table 3.1 Waste composition in Lagos from different studies (Source: Authors contruct) From Lavalin Inc. report From World Waste Composition (Bamgbose 2000) Bank (1999) report Cygnet 2002 Paper (%) 10 10 Textiles (%) 4 14 2 Plastic (%) 7 22 Non food putrescibles e.g. garden waste (%) Wood or straw(%) 60 45 Food waste(%) 68 5 Others 11 19 14 There are widely divergent views on waste generation in Lagos. According to the World bank sponsored study is about 0.21 kg per capita per day (Bamgbose et al, 2000). This result is very likely an underestimation of the reality because it was based on records of waste received at the various disposal sites across the city. In reality about 30% of waste generated never gets to disposal sites (Agunwamba, 1998). This could easily be confirmed by the ‘mountains of waste ‘ - illegal dumps prevalent during the period. An situation which led Rem Koolhaas, the famous Dutch architect after a six year study of the city to describe it in a 2001 presentation as a “giant rubbish dump” (Okunola, 2002). Other studies report daily waste generation rates as 0.35kg (Cygnet, 2002) 3.1.3 MSW Collection The state introduced private sector participation (PSP) in domestic MSW collection services at the local government levels in 1997, first as a pilot program in a few states and then full fledged in all the local governments in 1999, although in public areas such as markets, LAWMA still carries out collection services. Another body, the National directorate of Employment, as part of its employment generation scheme, purchased and loaned to unemployed persons registered with it, tricycles for waste collection. They go from house to house collecting waste and are paid directly by the clients. Another set of operators in the waste sector are local waste collectors who with the aid of carts, collect waste from clients who also pay them directly. 3.1.4 MSW Disposal Unquestionably, waste collection has been the priority, both in policy and in practice, for the state government. There is rarely any concrete plan for proper disposal. This perhaps explains the fact are no actual sanitary landfills in Lagos at the moment, or in the whole of Nigeria for that matter. LAWMA 23
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