•Says Alimosho, Amuwo-Odofin, Ojo, Ikorodu worst hit
•‘10,000 people living on Badagry road median, setback alone, messing up the environment’
By Olasunkanmi Akoni
Amid the current waste crisis across Lagos metropolis with the attendant health risks, Dr. Muyiwa Gbadegesin, the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, Lagos Waste Management Authority, LAWMA, in this exclusive interview, speaks on refuse heaps, infrastructure gaps, new waste management system, enforcement and the way forward for Lagos among others.
Lagos has been facing infrastructure deficit in waste management in recent times. What are the challenges and interventions being deployed?
Lagos is a rapidly growing megacity of about 22 million people. We generate between 13,000 to 15,000 tons of waste daily. To manage that, you need significant investment across the entire value chain of waste management which starts with containerization of waste, which, of course, is the trash bins or waste bins, which are used to keep waste in each household or business before collection. Once you containerize the waste, that waste has to be collected regularly, and for that you need trucks, and in Lagos, we use compactor trucks to do house-to-house collection. We are expecting by the end of this year Transfer Loading Stations, TLS, should be completed. Then, the MRFs, sometime in the first quarter of next year. At that point, we can close down Olusosun. One is already closed. ln the area of treatment and disposal, we have a long-term project, five-year project to build a biogas plant. That is a partnership between LAWMA and Lagos Metropolitan Area Transport Authority, LAMATA. We completed the feasibility study about a year ago, funded by the government of Sweden. And, I’m sure you’re aware that Sweden has achieved a very high level of circularity. We have been partnering with their government to replicate some of the achievements. Since 1942, the city of Stockholm has been treating their organic waste, both solid and liquid, and using that to produce biogas, which they pipe to homes for cooking, and heating the houses. They also use it for their public transport fleet. They have a network of filling stations where the buses can fill up with biomethane.
Biogas
We have started doing that in Lagos with the energy transition. LAMATA is bringing in about 2,000 CNG-powered buses. The plan is that those buses will after we have constructed the biogas plant, be powered by biomethane produced from our organic waste, which is 50 per cent of the waste that we generate daily.
In addition, we are also installing, biodigesters at the markets which generate high volume of organic waste. We’ve already started with the Ikosi Fruit Market, that’s a pilot project we launched in February. We want to place similar small-scale biodigesters at other markets like Alamutu, Mile 12, and Afolabi Ege. These are some of the markets that you see in the media with mountains of waste. Like Alamutu, you see huge piles of rotting plantain or plantain stalk. This is a high-quality raw material for production of biofertilizer. There is no point going to bury it in the landfill. We want to place those in all these markets so that they will have treatment of waste.
Smart bins
We have also made some investment in the area of containerization. The state government has about 80,000 smart bins, which are not free. The adoption rate has been somewhat slow. What we’re looking at right now is a situation where we can distribute it free to households, and then we’ll be adding a small amount to the bill every month so that you pay it off. We want to roll that out by the end of the year as well. By the end of this year, we are expecting 150 new compactor trucks. Each of the 57 local governments and Local Council Development Areas, LCDAs, have ordered two, and the state government is ordering 36, making 150. This will form part of a new unified waste management fleet that we will jointly manage with the local governments. By next year, we’re hoping to do a lot more in terms of new trucks. Our target is to have 2,000 trucks. To support that new system, we are going to do a lot of reform of the PSP programme. I’m not prepared to go into too much detail about that now.
PSPs operation
When next we discuss, I should be able to shed more light on that. There are already internal planning going on among the state government, Ministry of Environment, the House of Assembly, and the Association of Waste Managers to see how we can redesign the PSP system so that it can be more efficient, effective and responsive to the needs of Lagosians who are, after all, paying for that service.
LAWMA is aware that there are a lot of complaints about delayed collection and a lot of dissatisfaction with the waste collection services. We plead with Lagosians for understanding, and also I’d like to take this opportunity also to let Lagosians know that you can reach out to us directly when you have any issue on our free call lines. You can call these lines, you won’t be charged. 070 8060 1020 and 0800 0052 962, and you can also reach out to us on our email: info@lawma.gov.ng. If you send an email, you can attach your payment receipt so that we can look into whatever dispute you might have with the PSP operator or whatever complaint. We also invite those who want to get involved, like I said, it’s public-private partnership. If you have expertise or interest in any of those services that we need to provide to citizens we want to work with private sector players who are credible, who can deliver the services. You can also reach out to us by email, because we believe strongly that we have people out there who have the capacity to help in solving some of the problems.
Human challenge
On human behavior, this is another big challenge. It is a big city of 22 million people. Not everyone is going to comply. Even in places where you have regular PSP service, there are people who want to evade, they don’t want to pay, and have formed the habit of dumping their waste anywhere they please. That’s a big challenge for us because another thing that makes it even more difficult is that we have people coming into Lagos every day, and not everyone understands the way we manage waste. Most Lagosians, from my observation, are abiding by the rules, but there are a lot of people who are living on the streets. And I see them as climate migrants. They’re coming here for many reasons, including insecurity and natural disasters. They flood into Lagos. They sleep on the streets. In the last two years, I have seen like a doubling of the population of people sleeping on the sidewalks. Some of them are on drugs. That is a major problem now.
We continually do advocacy. We go to markets, we go to communities, we work with Community Development Associations, CDAs, and Community Development Committees, CDCs, with the local government, preaching to people that they should follow the laid-down rules and regulations with waste management, but there are still a lot of violations of that process. That’s why we’ve expanded our enforcement operations.
10,000 beggars
The most visible in the last couple of months is the major enforcement along the Badagry Expressway, where we did some initial study and we discovered that over 10,000 people after a census were living on that corridor. On the road, the median, the setback, living and carrying out their daily activities, buying, selling, everything, all bodily activities, they were doing right on the road. In fact, the most alarming example was one of them who had sunk a borehole on the median of the expressway and was selling water to the other people around there. We have been there for more than a month now, working with Rapid Response Squad, RRS, the task force, Kick Against Indiscipline, KAI officials, military officers from OP MESA, and we have done a lot. If you go there today, you will still see that we are still out, there is a large military presence there to clear that expressway. The development is moving quite well, the expressway construction and also construction of the Blue Line, which has been a very successful project, is being extended down as well. We want to clear that so that we can have that good infrastructure to serve communities in that area.
Clampdown
We have done a lot of arrests, and we have done a lot of advocacy. We have shut down some of the markets. We have shut down a lot of markets that are deliberately flouting the regulations. And we will continue to do that.
For us, ensuring that there is no waste in public spaces is a matter of health and safety for everyone because waste that is not cleared promptly can lead to disease outbreak, epidemic outbreak. Waste that is not cleared promptly washes back into the drainage, blocks the drainage, and causes flooding. It’s not just flooding, it also leads to destruction of the road infrastructure because if the water is pooled, the road is going to be destroyed, it’s almost like you’re grinding away the asphalt. That’s why we take that seriously, we can’t allow a few people because of their own convenience or economic interest, dump the waste, indiscriminately.
Advocacy
In the area of advocacy, we’ve also started something new, which is catching them young. The Governor has established the LAWMA Academy. That was his initiative about four years ago, and we’ve kept that going. Last Monday, we opened the summer school. We have an annual summer school, and you see the kids are here learning and doing practical exercises, building things out of waste. We have monthly internship programmes for undergraduates and graduates who come here for four to six weeks, and they learn about circular economy, waste to wealth, and they do a project before they leave. If you followed the news, we shut down a lot of fashion design outlets around Tejuosho, and Yaba over the weekend, for dumping waste and scrap on the roads. We’ve been warning them for a long time, they refused to listen, so we had to seal them. And that’s part of the behavioral modification that is necessary. Why are you throwing away scrap? And that material actually has value, because if you see what they made out of it. I don’t know why they are throwing it away. After they’re going to come here, we’re going to talk to them, we’re going to see how we can collect that textile and use it for other purposes.
Partnership
Every incident of illegal dumping of waste has a different reason. It’s not one size fits all. And that’s why one of the things we’ve done differently in the last two years, we established a Waste Investigation, Surveillance, and Enforcement Unit whose job is to find those who dumped waste illegally. What we used to do in the past is you clear it. That’s LAWMA’s job. If there’s waste illegally, you just go and clear it. But the next day you come back, you see the same waste, and you clear it again. And what we realized is that the more you clear it and the faster you clear it, the faster they’re going to bring it, because they actually think, okay, that’s where these people want us to be bringing the waste. A lot of people actually believe that this is where LAWMA is going to collect it, Go and put your waste there and they stopped waiting for the PSP operators. Those who were paying stopped paying.
The point of the purpose of the Waste Investigation, Surveillance, and Enforcement Unit is to trace where it’s coming from and why it’s coming there. Their job is: once we clear, you’re supposed to mark with caution tape. And you’re now supposed to go and engage with the community around, whether it’s a market or residential, engage with the PSP operator, What’s going on here? Ask the PSP operator, Who are the people complying? Who are the non-compliants? Who is owing,? ” so that we can get to the root of that waste leakage and stop it.
LAWMA
The role of the local government in that is that we ask each of them to set up a waste management task force. Now, that task force has a representative from LAWMA, the CDA and CDC, the PSP operator, the environmental health officer, and other stakeholders within that community. They are expected to meet on a regular basis, at least once monthly, to resolve issues of waste management within that local government. The local government, in addition, have been buying their own compactor trucks so that they can respond to some of these illegal dump sites as, you know, faster than maybe what LAWMA can do. And in addition, we have started licensing some of the local governments to have their own collection system. What we have discovered is that even before now, the trucks they’re buying are used trucks as well. The new ones, they’re going to be new trucks that I mentioned earlier, the 104 trucks are brand new trucks. We discovered that in a lot of areas in Lagos, a compactor truck cannot even access the community because of bad road, or in a place like Lagos Island, the streets are very narrow.
Trucks
Two years ago, Ibeju-Lekki chairman came here and told us, “This is the issue. The PSP can’t access most of these communities that he wants to introduce tricycle compactors. And we said, “excellent”, because as part of our study tour, we had gone to Ghana, and we saw how they were using tricycle compactors very effectively. And we went to Ibeju-Lekki, and at the same time, there was a young entrepreneur who had brought in some tricycle compactors. We put them together, gave license to the local government, and they’ve been working together since then. And people are paying. It’s not free. They pay N800 per bin bag. They distribute bin bags. Once it’s full, they come and collect. They pay with POS. And then the local government has a compactor truck that they use to evacuate waste from the tricycle compactor to the dump site. Since then, Lagos Island has joined that system. Lagos Island is making use of our Simpson TLS because the compactor can’t go all the way to the dump site. They come to the TLS and then we assist them to evacuate to the dump site. Badagry has also started, and many of the other local governments are going to introduce that. Another partnership with the local governments is to establish mini-transfer loading stations in each local government that the tricycle compactors, or those communities which need it, or the compactor truck can go and dump in that TLS, and then we can evacuate from that transfer loading station to either it’s TLS or straight to the MRF. That’s another thing that we’re working out with the local governments. We met with them, a business meeting, not political meeting about two months ago, and we’ve given them the design for those mini TLS. What they are doing now is identifying land where we can site those locations. Even the mini transfer loading station is going to be a business opportunity.
When we have those locations, we’re going to let people take charge and operate those, because when the tricycle compactor has collected money, so when it comes to that mini TLS, it will just deduct something from the wallet, from their POS, to pay to dump in that. That makes it sustainable. That’s exactly what they’re doing in Ghana. The idea now, what we want to do, is that some of those cart pushers, the ones who have who are manageable, that you can train properly; we can use them to operate the tricycle collection vehicles. Instead of using the cart, they’ll operate the tricycle. We will put them in uniform, they will have ID card, they’ll be regulated, and those are the ones who will be doing all this collection. Then the TLS, maybe the TLS will be operated by somebody who was formerly a PSP operator. He has a truck, you can just park the truck there, come, and they’ll dump, then he’ll collect his own money from them. They’ll go back and collect more. That is what we’re trying to introduce. But in doing that, I am not saying that we have all the answers. We are working with the local governments. Some of them are saying, look, they can operate the TLS themselves. In some areas, we can advertise and say, who has the capacity to operate this, let them come and operate it. But we’ll ensure that everybody gets something out of it, and that’s how it will be manageable.
Illegal waste collection
You notice there’s a resurgence of waste on Agege Motor Road. We clear that daily. If you pass through there right now, you’ll see four to five trucks clearing. As we’re clearing, they are bringing out huge sacks of waste. Once we clear one section, within one hour, you’ll just see people bringing out, carrying on their head. And we found out that somebody was actually operating a illegal waste collection business. They bought big sacks, they had recruited some boys for collection. LAWMA is clearing this thing. They now go and they charge people to bring out their waste, and they come and just drop it on the road for LAWMA to collect. Meanwhile, they’ve made money on their own, because in most of those areas, there are no PSP. But you can imagine the population and the impact. Mushin, both sides of Agege Motor Road, heavy population. You can imagine how much money these people are making. But they’re dumping it on the major highway for LAWMA to remove. That we’re talking to both local government chairmen, Odi- Olowo and Mushin, that this can’t go on like this. It’s one of two things. If you as a local government, you can coordinate your boys and your people to bring the waste, we will park our trucks.
We can mobilize six trucks along that stretch, so we park them at intervals, and we’ll tell you the time that we’ll be available so that they come and dump, for a fee so that we can buy petrol into the trucks.
Environment
But we don’t want to be clearing from the median, it doesn’t make any sense. You know, but it’s because the people bringing it out are collecting money. They’re so efficient in bringing out that waste, but the system doesn’t allow that. It doesn’t make sense, it’s not sustainable. Because once what happens is that once there’s waste on that median, and you have people going to do video, blaming and attacking the government. That’s where the collective engagement is essential. Very soon, we’re going to start an engagement exercise with all the local governments. That’s LAWMA, with some people from Ministry of Environment as well, having stakeholder meeting with all the local governments to bring these new systems, to explain what we want from them, because if you don’t do that, you are talking theory. And if people don’t see you, they won’t really understand what you’re talking about.
You mentioned incorporating local governments into the new waste system. In specific terms, what have you agreed on?
Every illegal dump has a different reason. What we have done is set up a Waste Investigation, Surveillance and Enforcement Unit. Instead of just clearing and leaving, we mark the areas, engage the community, the PSP and Community Development Associations, CDAs to find the root cause. With local governments, we’ve asked each one to set up a Waste Management Task Force with LAWMA, CDA/Community Development Committees, CDCs, PSP, and health officers to meet monthly. We have also started licensing LGs to run their own collection. Ibeju-Lekki, Lagos Island and Badagry are already running tricycle collection on pay-as-you-go. Residents pay N800 per bag via POS. The tricycle brings it to a compactor, which takes it to a TLS. Now, with the 150 new trucks coming, two per LGA/LCDA, we’re asking LGs to provide land for mini-TLS. We’ve given them designs. We’ll inspect the sites. The idea is, tricycles collect, dump at mini-TLS, then our big trucks evacuate to the main MRF. That way trucks don’t have to go house-to-house on bad and narrow roads.
Everything requires groundwork and funding, but we’re pushing it to the LGs. We’ve already ordered the new trucks. The question is: do you want those two trucks per LGA collecting on the roadside, or stationed at a mini-TLS with tricycles feeding them? Before the trucks arrive, we want the system designed. We have written LGAs to provide locations. We will go out and inspect.
The goal is to have the mini-TLS ready before the trucks land.
From your record which parts of Lagos are worst hit in terms of refuse buildup?
Alimosho, Amuwo-Odofin, Ojo, Ikorodu especially along the Ikorodu stretch, and Lagos Island councils. Generally, fast-growing areas and heavily built-up urban areas. In GRAs and estates with organized payment, there’s less pressure. But in areas with poor road access, tricycle collection makes more sense. Those are our targets.
On enforcement, what are current fines for offenders including community service?
We have always had community service. But we’re reviewing the law with the House of Assembly for stiffer penalties. However, enforcement only works when the system is functioning. That’s why we sometimes give 48 hours or seven days notice before sealing.
Once the new TLS and MRFs are running, anyone who still dumps will have no excuse. Even if PSP hasn’t come, dumping on the road is not an option. Residents can call us on 07080601020 or 08000052962 to report missed pickups.
How do you manage PSP operators who default, like not showing up regularly?
We do a monthly performance audit of all PSPs statewide. We check: are trucks working.? Are they coming as scheduled? What’s customer feedback? How many times did they dump at the landfill? They get a score. If they fall below, they get a query. After three queries, we can withdraw their license. Last year we withdrew about 27 out of 450. Same this year. That’s why some areas have gaps and we’re working with LG chairmen to provide backup.
**Residents also complain about PSP trucks parking indiscriminately and causing traffic. Is there orientation for them? **
Yes, that is one of the things we query them for. Some of the truck drivers park and start sorting waste on the road. That is against the rules. We’ll keep doing advocacy. We’re also doing a Five-year performance audit and residents can give feedback. If you see it, report to our toll-free lines and we’ll act.
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