Consistently for about three weeks now, it has been raining heavily in most parts of the country with flooding as the resultant effect. However, it wasn’t just flooding, destructive flooding, which in most cases shut down an entire community, killed people, destroyed homes and rendered vehicles immobile.
A few factors have been adduced to explain this. Apart from the warning that had been handed people in different parts of the country on possible flooding in vulnerable areas, especially places like Lagos that is sitting right on water; there were factors of poor drainages and continuous sand-filling of the lagoon for commercial residential purposes.
Unfortunately, what is being ignored often and which is more constant and likely than other factors is the refuse disposal attitude of people, which is not only poor and shameful, but often typifies the hygiene level of people living in those areas and which unfortunately, constitutes potential health hazard to other residents living nearby.
Nothing, however, captures this position than the recent clustering of a flooded area in Lagos, Akobi Crescent to be precise, with assorted plastic wastes, which blocked drainages as a result of refuse disposal attitude of people and which constituted huge health risk to them. The entire street, as long as it is, was littered with eye-aching floating plastics of sorts pulled out at once by the downpour.
Henceforth, it is expected that health officers of the state would go round for sanitation checks in such areas to ascertain the level of their cleanliness and how much health hazard that might be lurking in the corner. Besides, the government of Akinwunmi Ambode may have to reconsider its stand on the monthly sanitation exercise that was cancelled months back. It is clear that some people cannot live a healthy life unsupervised.