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THE rainy season is upon us, and with it many of the challenges that come with a dirty environment and we hope the City Fathers are up to the task to ensure that residents are protected from water-borne diseases. To this end, we urge the Harare City Council to give ratepayers value for money by clearing the mounds of festering garbage that have become a common feature in nearly all open spaces in the high-density suburbs.

The city should also clear blocked sewer pipes to stop the streams of raw sewage that characterise densely populated areas like Mbare and Nenyere Flats to stop the incidence of water-borne diseases. Equally important is clearing manholes that are used as storage by street dwellers that pose challenges of drainage in the CBD. Such a two- pronged approach; surface and subterranean, will no doubt, go a long way in ensuring that Harare moves to regain its enviable Sunshine City status of old.

But most importantly, a move towards improved sanitation will ensure that communicable diseases like the cholera and typhoid outbreaks that afflicted parts of the city in recent years become a thing of the past. We hope that like in the past, the City Fathers move to put in place a refuse collection timetable for all suburbs to ensure that all refuse is collected and disposed of in designated dumpsites.

Moreover, Council should deploy earthmoving equipment and front-end loaders along with refuse collection vehicles to remove the mounds of garbage that have accumulated in alley ways and open spaces in the suburbs. The refuse clearing process should be coupled with the distribution of plastic refuse bins in the suburbs. This is what a responsible council that levies residents for services should do and we are sure ratepayers would appreciate a clean environment.

However, the responsibility of keeping the city clean vests in all residents, who should play a part by ensuring that refuse is not strewn around, but is deposited where it belongs – the litter bin.

To this end we urge the City Fathers to ensure that the pavements are lined with litter-bins at regular intervals so that people find somewhere to dispose of their litter. We urge city councillors to launch awareness cam­paigns in their wards to discourage residents from depositing foreign objects in the sewer reticulation system. The city may also need to consider a blitz against litterbugs, particularly as a similar campaign a few years back had begun paying dividends before dying an inexplicable death.