A while back a pastor friend of mine was given a lift from Chingola to Kitwe by a Good Samaritan of western origin. As the journey progressed, the Good Samaritan offered my friend a gum – we shall call him Popoloza. He quickly rolled down the window and discarded the wrapper.
Suddenly the SUV came to a screeching halt! The Good Samaritan looked at him intensely. Popoloza could see that the man was hyperventilating; for a second he thought the man would smack him across his face.
“Suppose a thousand other people did what you’ve just done,” he fumed, “imagine the damage you’d be causing to the environment. And think of how your country would look like……….very dirty!”
He then graciously asked Popoloza to go back and pick up the wrap. As he clambered into the vehicle, he had a big egg of an ostrich on his face.
“Dear friend,” he was much calmer now. “It pains me to see folks dispose-off litter indiscriminately. In your case for instance, why don’t you simply keep the wrap in your pocket and find a rubbish bin when you get to your destination?”
Of course my friend was too ashamed to offer any excuse. The Good Samaritan later revealed to Popoloza that he was an environmentalist.
What do we make of this?
We simply live in a dirty country where everyone just throws litter anyhow hoping Mother Nature would take care of it!
Mountains of garbage are ubiquitous in every township let alone in our trading places. This isn’t only an eye sore but poses health hazards within our communities! You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to appreciate that rubbish dumps are fertile breeding grounds for pests such as cockroaches, flies and rodents. And when these unwanted visitors start vising our homes, they obviously bring with them a variety of diseases. We don’t surely deserve this?
As if this isn’t enough, dump sites have now become play grounds for our kids. Every day kids from compounds can be seen scavenging for scrap materials that they could convert into cash. These children are exposed to insalubrious things such as sanitary pads and diapers which can be detrimental to their health.
Sometime back the Lusaka City Council had intimated that they were contemplating bringing in experts from South Africa to come and help them come up with ways of controlling street vending in the city. Perhaps our civic leaders must also consider engaging experts from abroad to come and teach us one or two things about keeping our country clean.
By Prince Bill M. Kapinga
Good piece & great message, keep the country tidy!
No! The message is misleading. Our country is not dirty. Of course individuals are dirty but that does not make Zambia dirty. It is very stupid to think like that.
“What do we make of this?” This question reminds me of that young man who used to write a very good and objective opinion commentary in The Post. I dont know what happened to him. This is a very good article. I remember many years ago when Sata was governor under KK) and minister during Chiluba, Lusaka used to be very clean and there were sanctions for littering in public. How things have changed now.
ITS A VERY DIRTY COUNTRY, BUT I AM IMPRESSED WITH LIVINGSTONE, EVER SINCE THE UNWTO, THE CITY LOOKS INTERESTING, CAN DO MUCH BETTER BUT ITS A GOOD SHOW CONSIDERING THE DIRT IN THIS COUNTRY, I WISH ALL CITY COUNCIL CAN COPY LIVINGSTONE CITY COUNCIL WAY
AND MAY ALL, ESPECIALLY LUSAKA AND KITWE RESIDENTS IMITATE LIVINGSTONE RESIDENTS ON HOW THEY KEEP THE TOWN
What do you mean by saying “keep the country clean”???
The country is dirty and getting dirtier, nauseating. Yaba. It is so embarrassing when you see our foreign visitors negotiating spots and pools of foul smelling garbage and water respectively. We have been to other countries and are able to compare.
Well written, sanitation is a responsibility of all citizens. we should campaign to have a clean Zambia. see Livingstone, looks much better. if all cities can adopt that. we can have a much cleaner Zambia.
The problem is politicians who encourage street vending and throwing of Rubbish anyhow just to get vote.
Prince this is fiction. Go write a novel which I won’t buy. Why do you have to make the teacher of hygiene a muzungu? Because you think only bazungu can teach a muntu to be clean. Ma complexes ya inferiority. Na bantu nabo balishiba hygiene na pollution
kekekeke fiction,…. true! you dont need a muzungu to tell you how dirty zambian PF cities are,,,, same like Detroit, Budapest etc,,, where bazungus come from
We don’t need foreigners to come in to sort out the litter problem. We need to educate ourselves about littering. It is so strange that people throw litter when we have non functioning councils. So who exactly is supposed to collect the rubbish. The council has even failed with household waste. This is done by private companies. Why do we pay rates? They are supposed to cover rubbish collection yet we are forking more money for this.
Sometimes you follow a nice car and you see owners throwingrubbish out of the window. Ubututu! Schools need to take up the challenge and make a change for thefuture.
@2 Shimpundu Mwansa Kapwepwe – I don’t see anywhere where the writer says the Good Samaritan was a muzungu. There are lots of people of western origin who are not bazungu.
Ricky Bobby who are these people? you can comfort yourself in that fake belief but that won’t change the facts. The west is Europe and its occupied territories of North and south america Australia and n Zealand. They took some of us there as slaves.
Only because there are certain parts of London that the world will never see. That’s not to say I am happy with the rubbish heaps in Lusaka city. The western media take delight in showing Africa’s slums while their documentaries only show the best parts of their cities. Not places like Peckham in London for instance. in the late 90s ZNBC used to show a Thames documentary called ‘Britain today.’ and how many of us Zambians would have thought that places like Fishermead in Milton keynes existed?
Brief and point-blank. We can all contribute to a clean environment. The state of public toilets in any place also says a lot about that city /country’s hygene standards.
@Nine Chale
I assure you that the public toilets are just as dirty! It is really shocking that as much as the toilets are cleaned people just refuse to leave a clean stall behind for their fellows.
I had the misfortune to nip into a big department store in Wandsworth. These are cleaned regularly. But there was toilet paper everywhere on the floor! People peed on seats and did not wipe for others. Spit on floor!!
This is posh London! I tend to ask permission to use Posh hotel toilets when I am really desperate than ordinary places. It’s a human condition!
If the complaint is failure to have cleaning staff doing regular rounds every few hours then that is unsupportable.
@Nine Chale
I am referring to public toilets in the UK.
@Patriot Abroad,
You remind me of a cleaner at Nairobi airport who was scolding a man in a long white rob and a white kufi hat. I head him say, “Don’t put your feet on the pan,…” The man in a rob did not understand what the cleaner said. He muttered something in a language unfamiliar to me. So, the cleaner repeated, “Don’t stand on the toilet pan. You sit on it…!” I could not help but chuckle at what I assumed to have been the background of the man in a white rob. He probably had never used a toilet bowl before.
The moral of the story is that, our people need a counselor in high laces who would harp on the issue of cleanliness 24/7. The practice of having a running tap to wash one’s hands before eating nshima seems to have caught on. Mindfulness about littering can, too.
….and some of our politicians have equally filthy mouths. How is it that KAINGU IS STILL A MINISTER? The attitude of this government towards gender sensitivity is appalling. How does a minister refer to any woman later on a MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT with such disrespect and still have his portfolio. Is this what our cabinet is going to be reduced to? KAINGU MUST GO!
What about Garry Nkombo who called Kambwili .ChiKa.la ?
Is he supposed to be in Parliament , so for you only the people who do not belong to the cult/upnd are wrong ?
Chimbwili is a chik@la; so Garry was stating the obvious. Saying the truth is not insulting. Kaingu has no evidence of what he said. He was being malicious.
@robin Nkombo is not a minister. He answers to the voters of his constituency. KAINGU represents the president. So he is held to a higher standard. Besides Nkombo apologised and was reprimanded by the speaker. Lastly Kaingu picked on a woman and insulted her character. Calling someone a derogatory term is not the same as saying one for ndulges in acts of immoral conduct. To insult character is different from just calling someone a bad word.
Yep….you live in a sh!thole!!
there are no bins. blame the Council
Good observation. I have always wondered where to find a bin so I throw some litter, while traversing the streets of Lusaka, let alone any other city or town for that matter! Its cumbersome to move around with litter in your hands!
Lusaka the capital city where the president lives and works is so mind mindbogglingly filthy and I wonder whether these guys in government are really normal people. Rwanda, still fresh from genocidal ashes is fast becoming the best managed country in Africa and very clean too. Bill Clinton once referred to the capital as ‘that dirty city of Lusaka’. The sad part is the so-called leaders are so shameless they don’t see anything wrong with the ‘dirty city’ status. They are so used to it filth forms part of the background they thrive in. This situation is guaranteed to continue going by the less than worse caliber of those in charge of government. 50 of self-rule and the centre of government is still an ever-expanding vast garbage dump they mistakenly call a city!
Charity begins at home.we can conclude that zambians are dirty people though we look clean outside.fact check dirty cities,useless ministers ,collapsing economy and insensitive gender mps and ministers.conclusion we are stupid and dull zambian generation.
This is an excellent piece. In the 70s-80s we had trash trucks coming around the neighborhoods. Instead of improving on that, we fell back further and further. What is wrong with our hands???
What is more worrying is the perceived superiority of ‘Western’ people over Africans. Time and again when a fatuous Black Pseudo intellectual wants to make a point they use a bench Marker of that kind.
I have to point out that there are Western cities that are dirty too. The difference is Financial ability to deal effectively with waste removal. This problem is NOT about Black Zambians being dirty! All Human Communities produce Rubbish from the things we use in Life. The solution is MONEY, gov’t needs to set aside enough to deal with this problem of waste removal. YES people can help by careful disposal…..but if you put a piece of paper in a bin that is overflowing because of failure to remove waste to landfill sites, would the effect not be the same as throwing it in any…
YES people can help by careful disposal…..but if you put a piece of paper in a bin that is overflowing because of failure to remove waste to landfill sites, would the effect not be the same as throwing it in any place?
If this Western Environmentalist was intelligent and genuine he would have asked if the bubble paper cover was BIODEGRADABLE!! That would prove he was truly superior to his black friend. He would prove he understood the presence of rubbish was due to lack of funds for the gov’t to provide effective waste removal.
Black Zambian Males seem to have this problem of upholding White Males over themselves. Is this some kind of Racial emasculation? Are Zambian Males feeling less than their White Male Friends? It was worrying reading this story as even the Phallic…
Is this some kind of Racial emasculation? Are Zambian Males feeling less than their White Male Friends? It was worrying reading this story as even the Phallic Symbol in the shape of type of car was written with reverence, ‘ a SUV.’
This is very worrying. Are our Males growing into effective Zambian Male Roles?
In Zambia we have no thinkers. It all starts with the way land is allocated and subsequently managed by the councils. Go to Chalala in Lusaka where a 1 km stretch of road in the residential area can seriously damage your car beyond redemption. Drive from Kafue to Lusaka and see how dirty the road looks. We are lazy to think. Maybe we should engage school kids to give ideas of how to deal with dust and littered papers. Council management, what do you discuss in your board meetings? How you will steal money eh and allocate land illegally?
Good question! Yet, the council has a waste management unit gobbling millions of money!
Thanks to you all for your comments; this is no fiction at all, it happened. Shimpundu, where in Zambia do you live? I guess it must be a very clean place. Game meat, thanks for giving me an idea for my next article – next time I crack a whip at councils in the country. Watch out for this!
To hell with that western/muzungu friend of yours. We live Here in their back yard, tell him to clean the litter… Chew gums everywhere, un- empted street bins, the air pollution, you name it…
Environmentalist, my foot!! Just continue earning a living out of the millions your so called donors supossedly sends to help Zambia/Africa, what has chamged in the last 80yrs of aid to Africa Though!?
Africa is better off with China, not this crap muzungu anione
Wait until the Chinese open up shop to buy filth and you’ll see how clean Zambia will become. Just like the scrap metal business cleared the city of rusty old vehicles.
Only because there are certain parts of London that the world will never see. That’s not to say I am happy with the rubbish heaps in Lusaka city. The western media take delight in showing Africa’s slums while their documentaries only show the best parts of their cities. Not places like Peckham in London for instance. in the late 90s ZNBC used to show a Thames documentary called ‘Britain today.’ and how many of us Zambians would have thought that places like Fishermead in Milton keynes existed?
Your president does not see the dirty. Keep piling it.
Not the president’s job to see the dirt. It’s every citizen’s job to maintain high standards of cleanliness but the councils should take charge and do the jobs they are employed to do. If councils have no money, then introduce council tax and provide a first class service. You need law and order to archive this but unfortunately both none existence in Zambia today.
No need to defend Zambia as a clean city. We need a courageous leaders who can reverse the dead Cobra’s editct for legalising street vending. This is what you see when you google Lusaka
******
It is very rare to find a good clip of Lusaka. Yet it is refreshing to watch any video on Kigali and see cleanness everywhere. The places in Western countries which are dirty are those infested by third world countries migrants. I am Zambian and I am now ashamed to bring friends to Lusaka. For now, Livingstone is ok. Still Livingstone needs to do better. But whatever happened to a Chingola, the once clean city of Zambia? I am now tempted to say that Zambia also needs a white man to improve things.
Reading the responses from bloggers makes one very discouraged. Everyone is denying the problem of our filthiness and condemning the writer of the article. Dirty or the tolerance of it has more to do with attitude. And please, you can lie to Zambians who have not travelled and/or lived in Western cities. Those who have lived in (not just visited) Western cities will agree that the equivalent of the filthy seen in places such as Soweto market , Kuomboka, Chawama, Misisi, Chinika, Chainda, Garden, Kanyama, Chibolya, Makululu, George, and so many of our high density areas DOES NOT EXIST IN WESTERN CITIES. Produce the pictures. Yes, dirty exists everywhere but not to our extent. Unregulated vending does not help matters.
Just turn all those traffic police officers and ratsa into street cleaners. They do nothing apart from getting bribes from bus drivers. They are also like unwanted filthy litre especially in lusaka. What a country we have.