Last week, the entire Lagos was held to a standstill. Lagosians were unable to move from the mainland to the island and vice versa. The reason for this was a cloud of black soot emanating from the Lagos state designated Olusosun dump site at Ojota. With no prior explanation and no attempts to kill the clouds of black smoke emanating from the dump, thousands of Nigerians were legitimately vexed and took to social media to vent their complaints.

The complaints get to the seat of Power and Governor Ambode had to visit the Olusosun dump site twice last week, however despite the visit and promises made to the inhabitants of the area, it has gone from bad to worse, the smoke emanating from Olusosun has not disappeared instead it is on the increase thereby crippling human and economic activities in the area.

A lot of residents have vacated the area, businesses have been crippled most especially the transporters as their garage has been shut down. The state government through the ministry of environment has not done enough to ameliorate their sufferings, all they could say was for residents to vacate the immediate environs around the dump. If I may, where exactly is the Lagos state government expecting these people to vacate to? Alausa or Epe or Lagos house in Marina?

Lives are being endangered and the Itesiwaju Eko government’s big solution is to chase residents away from their homes? If I may ask, what happened to all engineers at the ministry of environment and the ministry of physical planning that are being trained with tax payers money for a better Lagos that they’ve not devised a final solution to this?

Are they not familiar with pollution control mechanism? It’s been weeks now are we going to wait until the smoke had its time and Lagosians start testing positive to lung infections and other diseases caused by inhaling carbon monoxide?

And to the Directors and senior civil servants at ministry of physical planning, we know that Olusosun was designated as a dumping site for over 40 years now, when development finally caught up with the dump site what was put in place by the Ministry to control the population explosion around the dump? Absolutely nothing.

The ongoing incidence at Olusosun is one of the indices that global rating agencies do consider to rate a state ‘a failed state’ we are fond of consoling ourselves with the mega city status but how many mega cities in the world has an humongous dumping site in its city centre like Lagos?

The occurrence at Olusosun has once again mirrored the failure of the government, the Ministry of Environment, Physical Planning and lastly the waste management companies that were tasked with managing the country’s Landfills.

This is life threatening and it must be put out as soon as possible!

tosin adesina