Operation Restore Legacy may have brought positive changes elsewhere but there certainly has been no such development in the area of environmental conservation and climate change awareness.
By Kennedy Nyavaya
It appears authorities have been dragging their feet in the environmental Conservation sector and this has been the prevailing reality even under the new dispensation. While the ordinary citizen may catalyse environmental damage through various careless activities, authorities have, also displayed incompetence on how to handle the problem.
And, for a journalist who may seek to highlight these problems, obtaining official comment remains a huge task.
The Ministry of Water, Environment and Climate, the Environmental Management Agency and various urban local authorities (Harare and Bulawayo included) who are all major players in raising awareness and preventing environmental degradation are all culpable for hiding information.
One wonders why there are people occupying these offices if they are not serious enough to ride on the current “open for business” mantra that President Emmerson Mnangagwa has been preaching since assuming office.
The current lot are not responsive and also seem to deliberately ignore serious issues affecting the masses.
Calls to solve contentious issues surrounding natural resource Conservation , clean water, green energy and proper sanitation, among other things, linger on, but with the current attitude we will not get anywhere.
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Environmentalist Kudakwashe Makanda recently told The Standard Style that there needed to be harmony between the government’s written plans of actions.
“The ministry has to craft policies that speak to the needs of people with regards to environmental consciousness, climate change and sustainability issues that seem very exclusive to the ordinary citizens,” said Makanda.
From their points of authority, the different governing departments continue to parcel out textbook strategies that are seemingly detached from the reality on the ground while at the same time not willing to take advice.
Makanda suggests a paradigm shift in both action and information dissemination so that simplified data, which is easy to comprehend for the layman is relayed.
“We need ideas that are sellable to the ordinary rural folk because that is where we have been losing it; we need to introspect on what we have been doing so far and make better decisions pertaining to where we are going,” Makanda suggested.
Currently, it would seem that despite all the talk, environmental protection is just not an issue that is considered important in the country especially by the powers-that-be. This has resulted in the continuing of unrestrained activities by citizens.
Environmental activist Denyse Bernard also weighed in saying there was noticeable disconnection between authority structures and people.
“One wonders if representatives we send every now and then to international environmental conferences actually learn anything there because they come back and sit on the information,” she said.
“It would help a great deal to have people who actually come back and engage communities at a large-scale to map out a way forward.”
True to her sentiments, there has not been much done to effectively engage, especially vulnerable societies except bringing their representatives for workshops where they serve as number-balancing tokens yet their ideas are not taken into consideration.
In other cases, authorities set up to help the police rein in on environmentally-unfriendly activity, but have oftentimes failed in enforcement, raising questions on their purpose.
If the current ship captains are truly leaders of their word, then it should not be hard for them to reform, based on acknowledgement that humanity’s existence depends on the health of Mother Nature, the environment.
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