He was referring to my column last week in which I bemoaned the littering in our cities and on our highways. This little letter from Bulawayo shows that littering is indeed a national problem. But what is heartening is that people who wrote to me and those I socialise with have said they are very willing to make a difference.
Hazel Magumise a senior officer in the Ministry of Trade and Commerce called and urged a national crusade to keep our country clean. Last Sunday morning as I was driving to the shops, the motorist just in front of me threw an empty beer can onto the road. Guess what? I trailed him until he reached his destination.
He was a lovely gentleman and we had a chat. Afterwards he said he realised the foolishness of his habit and would stop it with immediate effect. He would also talk about it with any motorist he saw throwing litter out their window.
But my most heartening experience was the immediate behaviour change by patrons at my local. Whenever they need to smoke they leave the bar; so the bar is now a non-smoking haven. But there is another little problem with this; they are still dropping their stubs on the paths and the lawn. I will kindly ask the proprietors to provide ashtrays and little bins outside the bar.
The other day while driving in town I saw three ladies dressed in immaculate red dresses; they wore gumboots and elbow long gloves. They were cleaning the streets. Obviously, they were too few to cope but it was heart-warming to see that the city fathers are doing something about the litter.
But another thought struck me! What do litterbugs think about these women and men who clean our streets? Do they respect them? Do they see them as human beings who should pride themselves in their jobs? One thing was certain; litterbugs are contemptuous people who think some lesser humans should go around picking after them.
This I think is a remnant of our colonial mentality. During the colonial days street cleaners were contemptuously referred to as scavengers by their white bosses who had a false sense of superiority.
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The term in itself used correctly is not scornful. Any dictionary will define scavenging as both a carnivorous and herbivorous feeding behaviour in which individual scavengers search out dead animal and dead plant biomass on which to feed. Scavengers play an important role in the ecosystem by contributing to the decomposition of dead animal and plant material.
In Zimbabwe people ignorantly look down upon scavenging animals and birds such as dogs, hyenas, jackals, crows and vultures. The cleaning role they play to our ecosystem is all but forgotten. So during the colonial era when city cleaners were referred to as scavengers people associated them with these scorned animals and birds.
This is what bore the attitude that we can throw our litter and leftovers on the pavements because scavengers will come along and clean after us. It’s a wrong attitude. These women and men are honourable people and they deserve all our respect.
Their job is maintaining the cleanliness of our cities and towns. They work from the assumption that our cities are clean; all they have to do is to maintain the cleanliness. But litterbugs have reversed this thinking; they work from the warped premise that cities must be dirty so that they can be cleaned.It will take a while to change this attitude because it seems to be ingrained in our collective national psyche. Two ministries must play a key role in banishing this attitude. The ministry responsible for the environment must come to the forefront and lead in the cleanliness crusade. But more importantly the Ministry of Education should see to it that we “catch them early” so to speak and design curricula that emphasise value of a clean environment targeted at children from grade zero.
Now and again we see the Minister of Environment, Francis Nhema and officials from his ministry, dressed in new dustcoats joining groups that clean our cities for their own selfish marketing purposes. His efforts to lend credibility to these self-serving groups and to himself do not mean a thing if there isn’t a sustainable, practicable national policy on cleaning the environment.
Without education these half-hearted attempts by the minister to convey a message on the environment come to nought. This is why we should see Nhema work closely with David Coltart at the Ministry of Education.
Zimbabwe has recently seen shadowy groups sprouting all over town and involving themselves in activities that disturb public peace. The most notorious of these is Mbare-based Chipangano. We also have youths who call themselves Upfumi Kuvadiki who advocate, through unsavoury means, youth economic empowerment.
Like Chipangano, they have become a law unto themselves. We also have belligerent war veterans associations, particularly the one led by Jabulani Sibanda which is rampaging across the countryside terrorising peace-loving civilians.
What if they transformed themselves into peaceful outfits that began by cleaning the areas in which they live? Mbare would be the cleanest suburb if the Chipangano thugs cleaned it with the same enthusiasm and gusto with which they beat up people.
When I checked the word scavenger on an online encyclopaedia I found the following fascinating:
“A Scavenger can also refer to someone who is a member of scavenger, a group of people who are trying to reduce the amount of waste that they produce by giving away their unwanted/redundant things to other people rather than disposing of them.
Most of them are within the UK but there are members from all over the world. Scavenger is just one of the many groups, that are springing up around the world, involved in the free gifting movement (gift economy).” We should see such groups mushrooming in Zimbabwe; the best place to begin would be in the streets in which we live.
BY NEVANJI MADANHIRE
