The government of Lagos State says it has moved to the Idi-Araba area of the state to clean the environment and restore sanity.
The Commissioner for the Environment, Babatunde Durosinmi-Etti, said this during a meeting with stakeholders in Alausa on Tuesday.
The commissioner said that Idi-Araba community had suffered from the abuse of the environment which could pose hazards to members of the community if unchecked.
He said the government’s intervention in the community, as well as many other communities in the state, was informed by the desire to protect the wellbeing of the people.
He said, “The signal that we are sending with our strategy of involving community stakeholders, who are actually the waste generators, is that waste management is a collective responsibility.
“For instance, you can see that we need to harmonise issues of enforcement and protection of sanitation workers with the people and enlist the support of community members.
Durosinmi-Etti said the cleaning of Idi-Araba was planned to carry along everybody at the grassroots, adding that volunteers, who would collaborate for enforcement and sanitation purposes, would be drawn from all segments of the Idi-Araba community.
He said the advocacy unit of the Environmental Services Department of the Ministry of the Environment had been mandated to train members of the community in appropriate waste disposal methods in order to sustain the efforts to sanitise the area.
