Addis Residents Eye Millennium with Huge Challenges!
By Fitsum G.
June 15, 2007
The fact that Addis is home to more than four million people most of whom live in very modest conditions, mediocre often overcrowded houses and quarters constructed with little planning, can easily suggest to you the kind of problem keeping the city clean and tidy could involve. Indeed it is a daunting task. An ungrateful challenge, one would say. The city cannot help reflecting the standard of living of the majority of its residents. Questions such as: ‘what percentage of houses in Addis avail of toilets with running water? How many people have easy access to these toilets? That is, are they individual or shared among many inhabitants? How many of these are clean and comfortable, endowed with the necessary privacy? How many houses or neighbourhoods are part of the sewerage system of the city? How many manage to dispose of their dry waste conveniently? come to one’s mind naturally. If you add to such scenario the case of public establishments such as schools, institutions and factories that do not avail of such facilities, then you can easily guess what kind of sanitary problems can arise in a city such as Addis. It is known that not even restaurants, bars, pastries, hotels, clubs and the like avail of enough and well maintained sanitary facilities. If at all there are these services, they are most of the time not functioning properly, deliberately or not, and clients are asked to be patient and wait until they are one day repaired.All these factors combined make Addis not very easy to keep its neighbourhoods and streets tidy, clean and completely safe from sanitation related health hazards. That is why Addis has always been an unmanageable city in terms of cleanliness and waste disposal. Now that there are several public activities in connection with the millennium celebrations, we believe/hope that one of the priorities of the organizers, the officials of the city and other concerned authorities and agencies should be to think of a thorough plan to tidy up the city and maintain such cleanliness all year round, until it becomes very rare to see some dirt or garbage strewn along the roads; until all stray animals, specially dogs are done away with.
Residents should first be well informed, trained if you like, that throwing garbage every where, freeing oneself of any sort of physiological needs any where in the open and the like should be considered not only shameful but also illegal and subject to severe contraventions. A clean environment means a healthy life for residents, and this must be well inculcated in the mind of each resident. If we reach such a consensus, it becomes much easier to maintain a clean and healthy Addis sanctioning and stigmatizing the violators.
Correspondingly, however, the City Council should prepare all the necessary supportive appliances and services for the residents so that they are stimulated and committed to abide by such rules. Under current circumstances, it is unthinkable that a similar plan could succeed. Hence, the entire sanitary system of the city needs revision and enhancement. Questions such as: How many public toilets are there in Addis? Are they commensurate with the number of the residents? How many households can afford to own their own modern toilets and bathing facilities? How many garbage cans are placed in the city? must be adequately addressed. All these matters should be carefully studied from top to bottom up to the kebele level and corresponding measures adopted by kebele chiefs and ‘idir’ (traditional associations organized for burial) executives and community elderly. Women, youth and religious associations also can have their say. If this precondition is not met, it would be a fancy to expect people to keep their neighbourhoods clean. A campaign that is run only once a year in the vicinity of Hidar 12 (November 19), a traditionally ‘national clean up the neighbourhoods day’ does not suffice to keep Addis tidy and healthy.
For many reasons, Addis is a very nice place to live in, and its inhabitants are considered as very welcoming and ‘enlightened’, polite and easy to socialize with by outsiders. Those who have lived in Addis long enough to absorb its spirit are particularly reputed of having inherited the most valued characteristics of the typical Addis original dweller who likes to enjoy life in company without taking things too seriously and breaking one’s head in worry. Native Addis residents say that the most distinctive and typical characteristic of a metropolitan as opposed to those who have just come from other, possibly rural areas, is that Addis residents normally are busy minding their own business and trying to make ends meet rather than go and seek the attention of others or meddle in affairs that do not particularly concern them, thus wasting time.
In as much as Addis Ababa belongs to every one of us, we also need to uphold and protect all its positive values while rejecting and eliminating the negative ones. We need to be concerned among others about the way the city is administered and how the city is trying to adapt to the fast moving winds of change. Constructions abounding every where, almost taking it by surprise, expansions in all directions, the residents’ number increasing by leaps and bounds, and most basic services such as electric power, telephone and above all water not catching up with the skyrocketing demand. As the city swells up by the day, the service rendering establishments have not managed to cope with the same speed. Rather they seem misplaced, disoriented. Roads are not large enough to accommodate the ever increasing traffic; lines and lines of vehicles are observed queuing every morning while people try to rush to their work places. Places such as Bole Road and Haile Gebre Selassie Avenue are most of the hours of the day very congested and to reach one corner of Addis from another, you could waste more than an hour! Those who use public transport know what kind of headache they have to go through to manage the crisis every day. They accuse it is scarce and the city council has not been up to their needs despite repeated pledges.
Pollution in the meantime is growing to be another disturbing health hazard for the Addis resident. To walk on Addis streets at certain hours teeming with used cars becomes really dangerous to one’s lungs. Green areas have not been duly protected as trees have been arbitrarily felled and the genial idea of good old Menelik II inundating the city with eucalyptus trees is not being supported by similar ventures. The motto now in vogue ‘every one should plant two trees for the upcoming second millennium’ could have results if well implemented. We will have to wait and see. The deforestation in act really needs more attention and more tangible action than slogans, rhetoric and numbers. Climate change is evident even in Addis with unusually rising temperatures and erratic cycles of rain. In fact, this is indeed a global challenge crying for global concerted solutions. For Addis residents it is an extra health hazard beside the one that emanates from waste thrown every where in the city centers, sewerage tubes that have burst, and water closets that have been left open and run in the city. All this does not contribute to a clean and green Addis. Residents along with their administrators must have a real say in the affairs of the city, and all such services must be reviewed along with suggestions to curb the problem.
At present, nothing seems to be moving in the right direction or if it does, it is too slow compared to the intensity and severity of the challenge. Addis needs a strategy of how to attain and maintain cleanliness and keep the environment, as a whole, healthy and green. For this the involvement and participation of all residents is a sine qua non condition. Roads should be continuously built or expanded so that they accommodate to the mushrooming fleet of vehicles of all make most of which are well used and worn out. Addis’ quarters must be well categorized: residence area, shopping or commercial quarter, parks and green area and the industrial quarter. In its more than a hundred years, it is true that Addis has had a number of master plans, but none has to date fully seen the light of day.
The millennium will keep Addis very busy if it wants to come to the 21st century with all rights and privileges. A lot of planning, a lot of resources and above all a lot of good will and hard work are going to be indispensable tools in this endeavour. As illegal constructions continue to thrive many in connivance with certain authorities, the administration seems disoriented as to how to go about and resolve the dilemma. Eviction and demolition would seem an unavoidable logical choice but there are huge humanitarian and human rights concerns to it. For the moment, Addis has only had some good luck in avoiding chaos and epidemics that could easily burst in some of its darkest slums, or suffer raging fires (if accidents happen or even some sort of natural disaster emerges) needing the fast mobilization of emergency services. There are little indications that Addis is ready for all that. In all such incidents, it would be difficult to manage aid to those who need it right away. That is why many are heard exclaiming that only a miracle keeps the millions of Addis residents well and safe, while they continue to go on with their daily toils. It is not really the mayor who takes care of Addis, but Providence.
While the issue of keeping the city clean has always been a much debated one and apparently successive Addis mayors have not been able to achieve it, Mayor Arkebe’s tenure of office was making some difference for a while until things got aborted thanks to a protracted crisis and vacuum in the city administration in the wake of the 2005 elections. Meanwhile, the much celebrated Gash Aberra Molla Project of Artist Sileshie Demissie seems to have faded apparently due to lack of funds, among others. Today, few people talk about the ‘clean up the city’ campaigns.
To sum up, ‘Keeping Addis Clean’ should be a major slogan for the millennium! Every resident should feel responsible enough to keep the city clean beginning with not using the streets and alleys of Addis as toilets, as garbage disposal cans. Addis residents need hundreds of sanitary facilities that can accommodate their needs. Otherwise, it is impossible to demand that people not urinate wherever they are in urgent need to do so. After all, it is a physiological need, isn’t it? In a city where even the residences, homes and public offices do not always avail of an adequate number of toilets or similar facilities, it becomes impossible for hundreds of thousands of Addis residents not to resort to easily accessible solutions of their own. To talk about the dangers of such exercise would be redundant. What a challenge for any city mayor to live with!