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THE heavy rain from the thunderstorm that passed over central Harare early yesterday afternoon highlighted the appalling litter problem that now plagues the capital city. Many streets and avenues saw serious flooding, largely because so many people block drains with their litter. But in other streets the drainage coped; a lot depending on when the catch pits, those entrances from the street to the storm water drains, were last cleared of garbage, how many take-away shops were in the vicinity, how many litter bins are on the pavements, and how much through traffic there is with car drivers chucking their garbage into the street.

Anyone wanting to see the true horror of central Harare’s litter problems simply needs to come to work early in the morning and watch the street cleaners, those hard-working ladies, shift vast quantities of litter, mainly containers of expanded polystyrene and cardboard, drink cans and plastic bottles.

They are backed by teams of municipal workers who have been going around, raising the lids of the catch pits and shovelling vast quantities of stinking garbage into trucks.
But within a week or so the catch pit is full again. Garbage collection in the city centre is reasonable, and there is little overflow of bins into the streets. The problem is litter.

The flooding is worse the closer one gets to Julius Nyerere Way, the street built over the drain that turned a swamp between the western and eastern halves of the city centre into prime building land. If the entrances to the drains higher up were all working then there would not be much water flowing into that boulevard. But with blocked drains the avenues leading to Julius Nyerere Way become growing rivers.

Some blame the city council. But even the worst of our councillors do not drive around with sacks of used take-away containers hurling them into the streets. The council does, in fact, do a lot to have this litter swept from the streets and dug out of the catch-pits. No doubt more could be done, if we were all prepared to pay higher rates to employ more people to dispose of our litter, but most of us dislike paying what we are already charged.

More street bins would help but vandalism has destroyed many and in some areas there are good security reasons not to have such bins.
The drainage of central Harare was designed to cope with severe storms, and for decades did so. There was litter, but in those days this was mainly paper bags, banana skins, orange peel and cigarette boxes, all small items that degraded quickly and, in any case, were small and so did not block drains. Drainage engineers did design the system so that leaves were flushed away, and anything that size and as degradable would not be a serious problem.

Soft drinks came in bottles carrying a deposit. If one was dumped someone would snatch it to claim that deposit. Now plastics, cardboard and aluminium dominate and they keep their shape and quickly block the entrance to a drain.

The only way we will avoid the sort of flooding we saw yesterday is if people stop throwing litter into the street. The odd non-litter problem, such as a tree root blocking a drain, can then be quickly fixed by the same people who now struggle to clean litter out of the drains.

Drivers could easily keep a bag in their cars and dump their garbage in a proper bin at work or at home; pedestrians could easily carry their used take-away containers, empty cans and bottles and do the same.

We would like to see litter by-laws enforced; the fines would pay for street cleaning. Perhaps many of the non-degradable containers so liked by take-away shops could be banned.
Those vandalising bins could be given community service, clearing drains.

But in the end we all need to recognise that if there is no litter there are no problems caused by litter. We can keep our city clean, and when it rains we can watch the run-off flow into the drains causing minimal problems. We are the problem. We can be the solution.