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The restarting of the high-profile public clean-up campaigns on Friday last week by President Mnangagwa in Bulawayo highlighted the need for unremitting efforts to change the way Zimbabweans create and regard litter.

The monthly campaign involving special efforts is obviously not done to clean up the previous month’s mess, but rather to set people an example of how they can and should keep the environment in their community clean and clear of litter, and part of the reason why the President himself gets involved with a broom is to show that it is not demeaning to do this.

And to give a lot of Zimbabweans their due, they do try and keep the verges around their homes clear of litter and do bag their garbage so that when the occasional rubbish truck comes past they can get rid of their waste quickly and easily and not leave piles of rotting garbage on their verge.

But we are still at the stage where we are looking at cleaning up after other people, and noticing that far too many people expect that someone will clean up after them as they seem to have the opinion that they have a divine right to dump their litter.

We need to be moving far more rapidly towards the situation where we do not have litter in the first place, and special efforts like the first Friday of the month can be converted into environmental improvements. Quite a bit of progress was made by many businesses in the early days of the President’s clean-up campaigns to meet one major need, for public litter bins.

After a lot of failures of other types, a robust and fairly simple littler bin was designed using a half 200 litre drum swung on gimbals in a simple frame. This appeared to be large enough for day’s litter from passers-by in its 100m range, reasonably vandal proof and easy to empty.

A lot were needed, as people seem exceptionally reluctant to carry garbage and if there is not a bin in the immediate vicinity tend to drop the litter in the street.

But since the bins are also a useful advertising medium they are still being made, painted and erected, although another spurt of mass installation would not come amiss.

There is the problem of emptying them.

The idea is that the local authority garbage trucks as they move around their area will stop and empty the bins so that we do not get them chocked with rubbish or have the problem of rotting garbage leaking over the top or corroding the bottom.

We have seen in other aspects that some cities and towns, and Harare as usual comes to the fore when there are problems, do not have enough functioning garbage trucks.

Considering the appalling fees that Harare is now planning on imposing from next month to collect garbage it would be useful if they could give value for money by actually collecting it, as well as collecting the public litter in the public litter bins.

The fact that a private company is now a viable business by collecting rubbish for fairly stiff fees shows that the demand for decent services is there.

Harare, and other towns, could also take a leaf from the company which insists that garbage it collects is neatly bagged. You do in fact pay by the bag and their trucks as a result seem to suffer a lot less damage.

Admittedly users know when the truck is coming. One problem that even conscientious householders have with the intermittent Harare collections is that no one can leave even neatly tied bags of garbage on the verge for days waiting for the trucks.

Stray dogs, if not worse, can quickly rip those bags to shreds and smear litter over half a block.

Even if Harare cannot collect weekly, as it is supposed to do, it should be able to at least collect on the same day of the week when it manages to get a truck, so the bags can be made ready and everyone knows a truck may be coming.

The central Government has had to intervene in some much that should be the responsibility and the job of the local authorities that intervening in garbage collection seems a bit much. But it may be useful for the Government to audit the council fleets of trucks and try and work out why these seem so often totally inadequate.

Forcing councils to spend their capital budgets and their garbage collection levies on buying new vehicles might be a solution.

Senior council officials seem to be able to get their councils to buy luxury vehicles for the sue of those officials, yet the provision of the basic vehicle fleet seems to come a poor second.

But providing many more litter bins and having decent garbage collection is just an aid to what more people need to be doing, not littering their environment in the first place. Few people strew rubbish around their house, or even their garden.

Yet they seem quite happy to let the litter pile up along someone else’s property.

Car owners could easily carry a small bag and stuff the rubbish they generate in their car if they insist on eating and drinking while they drive, and dispose of this in a bin, but most seem to think they are entitled to throw everything out of the window, even burning cigarette ends that have caused major fires.

Changing cultures is possible. President Mnangagwa has seen this and even in Zimbabwe he almost certainly found less litter in Bulawayo that in most centres where is has taken a monthly lead in a clean up, since there is growing pressure in that city not to litter in the first place.

What is now needed to is to make public littering something so socially unacceptable that people simply do not do it, although we should also remember that there are anti-litter laws that can be enforced.