Trash Talk

Garbage Smoking at Freetown's Bome Dump

Trash is the story of the human age. Wherever a few thousand of us are gathered  together, garbage flourishes. Abundantly. The age will probably eventually be assessed by how we handled waste of which, currently, there is an almost endless variety, each with its own peculiar challenge. Solid or liquid, chemical or nuclear, animal, vegetable or mineral, all threatening extinction. But the mother of them all is, of course, hydrocarbon waste, CO₂, the principal cause of global warming.  But, however important global warming is, it is not what I want to talk about here.

While CO₂ emission is crucial to Earth’s long term survival, we can get away with ignoring it, albeit temporarily, because the gas is both invisible and odourless. Solid waste, on the other hand is visible and ugly, and in your face. Besides, it smells. It blights and may attract disease-carrying vermin. It is impossible to ignore. It accumulates in astonishing quantities and unless there is a place to put it, it soon becomes a political football of massive proportions. No one wants it in their backyard, and the howls of protest that ensue whenever you attempt to locate it at some place or the other can be heard up and down the land and even beyond. Sometimes, people even get violent, as was the case last year in Lebanon, when the good citizens of Beirut got fed up with their city government’s inability to properly dispose their garbage. Eventually, they did come up with a solution: Dump it in a place far, far away. And that is how Sierra Leone suddenly became the potential beneficiary of Beirut’s 100,000 tons of garbage.

The proposed deal was apparently made less sour by assurances from the Lebanese that the consignment would be “non-toxic” and that it could be processed in the recipient country to fertilizer. Ha! Needless to say, there have been loud cries of protest in and out of Sierra Leone, with the official who signed the letter agreeing to the proposal landing himself in something worse. It was difficult to see by what process that Honorable Member of Parliament and Presidential aide, Alhaji Ibrahim Ben Kargbo, came to the conclusion that this was a good idea.  Now the President has nixed it all and ordered a criminal investigation into the fiasco. One hopes that this puts an end to the matter, apart from potential criminal charges and/or sackings.

Tell Fren Tru