The Nigerian government should take stringent measures against landlords building houses without proper toilet facilities before going after citizens engaging in open defecation, the Country Director of WaterAid Nigeria, Chichi Aniagolu, has said.
Mrs Aniagolu stated this on Wednesday at a workshop and launch of the “Context Analysis Study of Urban Sanitation in three Nigeria cities: Enugu; Kano and Warri”.
She was reacting to calls for the criminalisation of open defecation.
Last month, Vanguard Newspaper reported how the Minister of Water Resources, Suleiman Adamu, urged the Federal Capital Territory Administration, (FCTA), to make open defecation and ‘reckless urination’ an offence amidst an increase in irritating sights of human excreta in major streets of the capital city.
Reacting, the country director said it would be punitive for the government to go after citizens engaging in the undignified way of passing bodily waste without putting in place adequate toilet facilities.
She blamed the acute lack of access to proper toilet facilities across Nigeria as reasons why some citizens believe they have no alternative than to indulge in open defecation.
“I think sanctions are important but before that, we have to make sure the facilities are available because nobody wants to sit under a tree to defecate openly,” she explained.
The official said the regulation should rather focus on house owners. “Sanctioning landlords that build houses without toilets”.
“We need to make sure the infrastructure is in place. If there are public toilets and people still defecate openly and illegally, then they can be sanctioned but sanctioning someone when there are no facilities is unnecessary and punitive.”
Open defecation
Nigeria is only second to India in countries with the largest population of people who practise open defecation.
More than half of approximately 200 million Nigerians do not have access to decent toilet facilities and as a result, about 47 million of them indulge in open defecation.
The poor access to facilities has become a crisis in the entire Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector extending to institutions.
According to WaterAid, 50 per cent of all schools in Nigeria do not have basic water supply, sanitation and toilet facilities while 50 per cent of health care facilities lack clean water. About 88 per cent of them lack basic sanitation.
Nigeria is also experiencing rapid urbanisation which is further putting a strain on an already inadequate WASH infrastructure resulting in significant health risks, linked to deaths from diarrhoea, cholera, and typhoid.
In 2016, Nigeria launched an action plan of its own, aimed at ending open defecation by 2025 by building millions of toilets and aimed at changing the habits of citizens.
The plan also involves providing equitable access to water, sanitation, and hygiene services.
Last November, President Muhammadu Buhari declared a state of emergency on the WASH sector and relaunched the ambitious plan to end eliminate open defecation by 2025.
Barriers
Meanwhile, health advocates believe there is a wide gap in the implementation of the plan.
To meet the 2025 target, Nigeria needs to build two million toilets every year from 2019 to 2025.
But, Bioye Ogunjobi, a WASH specialist for UNICEF, said the country is currently delivering about 100,000 toilets annually, according to Devex.
To provide insights into the key barriers and opportunities in meeting the 2025 target, WaterAid Nigeria, earlier this year commissioned Mangrove and Partners, a public policy research consultancy firm to conduct a context analysis of urban sanitation in Enugu, Kano and Warri.
The study released on Wednesday found that policies intended to address sanitation challenges are skewed against each other and that sanitation is largely overshadowed in terms of details, targets and budget.
“…in many cases, the policies do not make provision for faecal sludge,” the report read partly.
“Across the study cities, it was found that the content of sanitation-related state policies are generally not amenable to private sector participation and citizens’ ownership and the oversight functions on sanitation are fragmented across different MDAs.”
The study which specifically looked at institutional and legislative framework in managing sanitation in the three cities also found the state government’s funding priority for water and sanitation to be extremely low. PREMIUM TIMES
