Editorial: Cleanliness should be our way of life

Volunteers cleaning our streets, including young men, women, and older women is not only heart-touching but highly nationalistic. This exercise is going on in preparation for the festive seasons and mainly for the pending inauguration of President-elect, Joseph Nyumah Boakai and Vice President-elect, Jeremiah Kpan Koung in January 2024. 

These mass volunteers signing up to clean the capital and its suburbs are revolutionizing the way we ought to take care of our capital, looking and waiting on government to do for us clearly what we can do ourselves.

But cleaning up the city should not be only for Christmas or inaugural purposes. Instead, it should be a way of life for us, as Liberians. We do not need a special time to clean up our city or our environment. It should be a daily, weekly, and monthly practice to set go example for the next generation of Liberians that cleanliness is not just hygienic, but Godly.

We dirty the city and our communities all of the time without any remorse. It is correspondingly important that we clean it regularly instead of waiting for a specific period or a national event.

Unfortunately, Monrovia is littered with garbage and feces everywhere. Shamelessly even public buildings such as the Capitol and other places are not spared of garbage. Grass has swallowed the Capitol. It lacks running water and functioning toilets. Yet this is where our elected leaders sit to represent us! No wonder why President-elect Boakai has chosen to take his inaugural program there, to ensure it is given a proper facelift.

This was not the case in the past especially, during the Tubman, Tolbert, Doe, and most recently, Sirleaf eras, because relevant state institutions responsible to keep the city and its environs tardy were fully functional such as the Monrovia City Corporation and the Liberia Water and Sewer Corporation. 

The MCC is the enforcer of city ordinances, while the LWSC is responsible for the sewage system and running water in the capital. But these institutions have broken down completely because of bad administration and corruption. The LWSC cannot provide the city running water and sewer services so feces littered the streets due to clogged sewage lines, while the MCC has collapsed under recently sanctioned Mayor Jefferson Tamba Koijee.

The incoming administration of President-elect Boakai should maintain the current group of volunteers to help keep the city and parts adjacent cleaned from time to time to demonstrate Liberian pride.

Garbage and feces are breeding grounds for roaches, rats, flies, mosquitoes, and other rodents that come directly into homes and contaminate food and drinking water with sicknesses such as cholera and diarrhea. A clean environment is a healthy environment that promotes healthy people.

Such delicate responsibility is not a child’s play and should not be assigned to someone with divided or mixed priorities. It should be reserved for people with enough innovation and resilience to execute the job of maintaining a healthy environment that will drive the health of the nation.