Compulsory garbage  bill payment opposed  

Sat, 11 Feb 2017 09:58:05 +0000

PLANS to make waste management fees compulsory for Lusaka residents through Zesco bills by the  Lusaka City Council (LCC) has been strongly opposed by the Zambia Council for Social Development (ZCSD).

ZCSD executive director Lewis Mwape said that in as much as the local authority would come up with successful ways of collecting funds from every household in the city, it would be difficult for them to collect garbage from everyone.

He said in an interview with the Daily Nation that collecting funds from people without collecting their garbage would be tantamount to looting.

Mr Mwape wondered how the City Council would do that when it did not even have a proper register of households in the city.

He questioned how LCC would take stock of the households from which to collect waste if it did not have proper records.

Mr Mwape advised the local authority to first of all sanitize their records before coming up with such initiatives that he said called for transparency.

“With this initiative, I can say LCC will in the end just be stealing from the people of Lusaka. Of course, they can manage to collect funds from everyone in various ways but the issue would be collecting garbage from the residents. They do not even have proper records of the households in Lusaka due to the unplanned settlement,” he said.

Mr Mwape pointed out that there were some townships in Lusaka had very bad road network, saying that would make it hard for the local authority to collect garbage. He said that LCC would not successfully implement its initiative if it did not first of all work on the small things such as creating passable township roads and a proper database. And Mr Mwape said that creating a database would actually have a multiplier effect as the local authority would use it to bring sanity in many areas.