HOUSEHOLD REFUSE PILES UP in every village, in the heights and terraces as well as along the country’s highways – and not a word of regret, explanation or excuse from Minister of the Environment, Dr Denis Lowe or acting general manager of the Sanitation Service (SSA) Authority, Rosalind Knight.
The SSA, which daily needs 30 working trucks to guarantee each district just one collection per week, has mustered only eight or nine some days recently – and not a word of clarification for suffering citizens from Lowe or Knight.
The country is told that the volume of garbage reaching the Sustainable Barbados Recycling Centre has fallen by almost half in the space of a year – and neither the minister nor the acting general manager shows even a pang of remorse.
Garbage keeps turning up in our cart roads and gullies by the truckload – and the person in charge of the relevant ministry and the head of the agency at the centre, open not their mouths.
Three expensive tractors owned by the SSA and purchased for use at the Mangrove Pond Landfill have not worked for extensive periods, while that agency rents a private tractor for more than a year at a cost of $23 000 a week – and apparently neither Minister Lowe nor the SSA’s boss believe the public of Barbados deserves an explanation.
We suspect we have made our point that there is now an endemic silence of disrespect permeating the Ministry of the Environment and that key agency. Those in charge seem to believe they are answerable to no one – certainly not the taxpayers.
This is not the level of accountability promised to us when Lowe and his colleagues came to us in 2008, seeking our endorsement on the basis of “good governance”.
Let us pause to recall the relevant words in the 2008 manifesto that bore the names, faces and pledges of Lowe and his 29 colleagues: “There is therefore a need to clean up (sic) politics in Barbados. The Democratic Labour Party has selected a team of clean, caring, competent and committed politicians who have signed on to a code of conduct that promises good governance. Good governance has eight major characteristics: Consensus oriented, accountable to the electorate, transparent in all its decision-making, responsive to the needs of voters, effective and efficient, equitable and inclusive, and follows the rule of law.”
Accountability? Transparency? Responsiveness? So why are voters, taxpayers and citizens made to feel we are not entitled to explanations? In the same way that these public servants can stand before a microphone and spout innocuous platitudes when they have to open some workshop or exhibition or in the case of politicians, when they make the Sunday evening rounds to constituency meetings, why this mute button now?
The situation with our garbage collection and solid waste management is sufficiently serious that Prime Minister Freundel Stuart should tell his Minister of the Environment that he has to treat the matter as one of urgent national importance.
And it is time Minister Lowe himself tells the acting head at the SSA that she is not a law unto herself and should follow the example of those who preceded her and recognise that the SSA is not a personal fiefdom.
Our national health, the cleanliness of the environment for our use and that of our guests, and the way that her agency spends public funds are sufficiently critical to Barbadians that Knight’s recent practice of abruptly terminating calls from reporters is not good enough.
Ministers and leaders of state agencies that do well, that are held in high regard by the public and that have a track record of efficiency may be excused when they occasionally throw a tantrum or display some semblance of arrogance. But when it is the SSA, which has deteriorated into a unit that functions below par, and is consistently unable to fulfil its mandate, thereis no room for such displays of conceit and distance.
Frankly, our national waste management portfolio stinks to high heavens. And if those who sit in their lofty offices at Warrens Tower 2 and the NPC Building at Wildey can’t smell the pungent odour they have created, all they need to do is drive along the Arch Hall segment of the Ronald Mapp Highway, downwind of the Mangrove Pond Landfill.
It would help considerably if they turned off the air-conditioning in their cars and open their windows.
