By Hassan I. Conteh

Since John was a boy Sierra Leoneans can’t handle proper the filth in the capital Freetown.

There have been little efforts to get off our rubbish from the streets. The past NPRC junta regime had tried to see our city clean in the late 1990s.

But their short days in office were short-lived by the country’s military coups.

The NPRC regime was known for our yester-years’ Saturday Cleaning in a month.

Like the popular Australia Clean Up Day, the NPRC of Sierra Leone brought up the weekend cleaning activity to be done by everyone and every house, every office and every market.

Saturday was set as the day to clean up the streets and every home in the capital Freetown and in the provinces.

The good practice ended as the regime leaped off from power.

Government of Sierra Leone recently brought back the Saturday Cleaning to life in 2018. But that only lasted at least a year.

Most people say the Freetown City Council (FCC) only exists as a name as it’s not doing much to get the city clean.

By law, it’s supposed to organize and monitor men to keep the city clean always. But this has not been happening since the White men (British colonial masters) left Sierra Leone to enable us run our affairs.

The health ministry, which is supposed to advocate on the importance of cleaning and people practising hygiene, only focuses its attention on attending to sick patients who often lay in our many filthy hospitals.

The health ministry has not been publicly informing people the need to keeping their environments clean by way of preventing several illnesses.

Nowadays, Sierra Leoneans see and live with the dirt on a daily basis everywhere in the country.

While the citizens are also to be blamed for carelessly loitering the streets, FCC and the police don’t show little care on enforcing the bye-laws on people throwing dirt recklessly.

Since people are left to do whatever they wish with the dirt, they don’t get any fear to throw more rubbish on some prohibited areas.

As an environmental journalist since 2020, I often walk up to places like Peterson Street at Regent Street in central of Freetown and also like to visit many more communities in Freetown.

The experience in walking up to these places is never so different as it is common to see traders or petty traders who don’t hesitate to throw away  thrash or huge piles of rubbish anywhere in the streets and in open spaces.

The attitude is ingrained on traders and almost everyone in Sierra Leone maybe seen irresponsibly dropping out on the streets some peels of ripe bananas or groundnuts or the likes of it.

Other countries in Africa like Senegal, Ghana, Kenya and Rwandan have very clean cities which are good for tourists visit.

They succeed to make their cities and rural towns clean as always because they take seriously the good habit of cleaning every compound, open area or environment where one may find himself/herself.

Government authorities in those countries who are in charge of keeping the streets clean would never hesitate to levy big fines on anyone who is caught throwing out as small dirt as an orange peel.

But our school teachers don’t impose fines on defaulting students who let out rubbish in the school compounds.

Neither do our government authorities impose fines on people for sprinkling rubbish in public places and on the streets.

So the children grow up to be irresponsible by not handling or taking proper care of even  the rubbish found at their homes.

Adults too don’t get used to cleaning up their houses and so when they come to the streets or find themselves in public places, they know well that there are no rules or fines to be levied on them for carelessly throwing rubbish on the streets.

And so everywhere you go to, you’ll see people, in vehicles, in offices and market places, are carelessly throwing the rubbish on the streets only to be cleared off when rains pour harder.

So will journalists have to write about people’s wrongs always when people still do what they like doing while law enforcers don’ t do what they ought to do?