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The Politics of Trash: Is Hargaysa about to call it Quits?Faisal Roble Los Angeles, Januray 13, 2005 Close to the ouster of the late dictator, Maxamed Siyaad Barre, Hargeysa was experiencing a near-absent condition of municipal services. For example, power distribution in the city reached a point of scarce rationing. The Chinese-built water system at Geed Deeble seemed to have stopped working. And as many should remember, the issue that galvanized the conflict in the city was its unsanitary hospital, which at the time generated a significant opposition by the residents to the government. Under Rayaale's rule, Hargeysa seems to be in a de ja vu and has once again failed to provide its residents with acceptable level of basic services. Trash politics in Hargaysa is on the front burner this time. In the Absence of Planning, A Beautiful City May Die On January 8, 2005 , in a one-on-one interview with the BBC field reporter, Axmed Saciid Cige asked the Deputy Mayor of Hargeysa whether the local government failed to handle the trash of the city and whether it has outsourced trash collection and removal. The honorable Deputy Mayor answered both questions in the affirmative. He revealed that six local Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) would be contracted to handle the city's trash. The honorable Deputy Mayor also admitted the grim state of the city's poor sanitary conditions. Yesteryear's beautiful panoramic landscape of Hargeysa, ornamented with evergreen Gob and Qudhac trees, seems to have given way to today's poorly maintained public streets scented with foul stench and littered with layers of non-bio-degradable discarded plastic bags. It seems that neither Hargeysa's local administration nor said local NGOs have any comprehensive long- and short-term sanitation plans. Without this, then the work, whether it is done by either inefficient/non-professional municipal employees or unqualified NGO staffers, becomes a hit-and-miss game. What does a comprehensive sanitation plan entail? In a city like Hargeysa, a comprehensive plan must identify different sources of trash generation (both solid and non-solid waste materials). A second layer of such a plan seeks to know how many people live in Hargeysa? Where do they live? Do they live in single-family districts, apartments, group homes, hotels/motels? It also helps to know how much of the city's trash is generated by strip commercial uses. This set of information would give one an idea of the total volume of trash generated per day/week/month or year by different land use patterns. The second question is what to do with the trash. The only available means for a city like Hargeysa at this point in its developmental stage is to incinerate and/or dump tones of trash in pre-designated/planned sites. These sites (where you burn or dump trash) should also be monitored and regulated and subjected to capacity evaluation for long-term or short-term needs. This makes a must for the city to have a 5-, 10- or 20-year planning horizon for capacity management. That is to say the city assess how many more sites or dumping grounds are available or would be needed during said planning horizon. Based on the questions and answers session between BBC's Cige and the honorable Deputy Mayor of Hargeysa, neither the city nor said NGOs seem to have any such plan or planning process in place. It is not, therefore, surprising that the once clean city of Hargeysa is now a city where smoke engulfs the skies on a daily basis owing to unplanned and erratic trash burning at unregulated multiple sites within the boundaries of the city. This is unfortunate in that the residents of Hargeysa are faced with rather a protracted modern urban problem and a medieval and pedestrian solution. By burning trash at will inside and/or at the outskirts of the city is rather a serious health hazard, causing city residents to inhale millions of carcegenic materials within seconds. One, therefore, wonders whether it is more dangerous to leave trash accumulate in the neighborhoods of this once beautiful and clean city or burn tones of them in close proximity to children, old and the sickly. Without good planning, either way Hargeysa is in a catch 22 and it's generally healthy/good air quality is besieged under its incompetent rulers. The Politics of Trash And the Death of Hargaysa's Governance What does outsourcing municipal services (solid waste or trash management) in Hargeysa say about Somaliland and its political governance? It says two things: either Somaliland 's government is extremely inefficient or/some irreverent mafia style corruption is the deriving force for such unwarranted outsourcing. Let us briefly address these two issues from governance perspective. Between the 1960s and 1970s, what was known as underdevelopment school of thought exonerated Africa and its leaders from all the blame of why development did not occur and blamed the continent's ills on outside (colonial) forces. In the 1970s, several authoritative studies have been produced in the field of African Studies, invariably all moving away from underdevelopment theory to more of an inwardly critical looking view at Africa itself, hence resulting in a new paradigm of analysis. This new paradigm correctly blamed Africa and its leaders for a good portion of the continent's ills. Since the 1980s, Africa's governments have shown a sharply declining capacity to handle public services at the local and national level. Such a decline is an indication of a weak government. By the mid-1980s, NGOs and Private Voluntary Organizations (PVOs) were hastily taking up the roles vacated by national agencies and local governments in the delivery of services. Church groups, Aid organizations and local NGOs/PVOs steadily assumed the role hitherto reserved for state agencies and local governments. However, governments in Africa heavily invested in one sector, i.e., the national defense at the expense of badly needed urban services. In the case of Somaliland, however, there is no huge military establishment a la the days of Barre to support. There is no Navy or Air force to compete for the country's budget with other services. There is no border conflict against Ethiopia or Djibouti that consumes a larger portion of the hardly earned pennies. In this case, Somaliland should have been able to run an efficient local government with good services. Absent of efficient local government after thirteen years of “self-governance,” one can easily conclude that Hargeysa's governance is waning and weakening, only to be stepped in by inexperienced NGOs and the likes. As to outsourcing the management of Hargeysa's trash, several problems abound. First, what is the technological and professional capacity of said NGOs? None. One may even suspect that they are most likely less equipped than the local government they are set out to replace. All that these NGOs may do is to simply assemble several hauling trucks and hire some of Hargeysa's over-abundent cheap daily laborers (Kuuli) and then haul trash from one site to another. Most likely, city officials may not care what these NGOs do with the trash, where they burn or in whose backyard they dump tones of dangerously bio-non-degradable materials as long as they remove them from public view. As far as the problem is temporarily contained, the honorable Deputy Mayor and his superiors are, it seems, satisfied. In the midst of this, Hargeysa is approaching what is expectedly to be a hotly contested parliamentary election this coming spring. Hence, the politics of trash in Hargaysa is on the front burner. That is why one has to assume that Rayaale's political cronies are the beneficiaries of these lucrative cash cow contracts in a city plagued by poverty and underemployment. If so, Hargeysa's Hall of administration shall finally call it quits under the mighty weight of its own politics of trash Faisal Roble City Planner, Los Angeles |
