Last week, Yobe State governor, Bukar Ibrahim, declared that his state will hold monthly environment sanitation exercises on the last Friday and Saturday of every month. He thus joins the group of a few states that have re-introduced an exercise that held national spread during the military era.

For the military, the monthly exercise was intended to be a dramatization of their concern on the environment. Thus, rather than put in place an enduring system of refuse collection and disposal, the military government dramatized it, seeking to impress and hoodwink the people into accepting a practice with limited creativity or possibility of success. At the dawn of civilian rule in May 1999, the practice was scrapped.

Today however, the compulsion is creeping back. In Lagos state the government reintroduced the exercise about a year ago. Rivers State also has its own version, as well as a few other states.

The sad part of the exercise is that it happens at disparate periods of the month in almost all the states where this is in practice. So that while one state grinds to a halt for a few hours during a particular Saturday, perhaps on the last Saturday of the month, another state chooses the middle Saturday of the month or the first Saturday of the month.

The effect is that there is a national economic and social dislocation. And nobody cares. Nationwide and intra state travels and movement of persons and goods are disrupted at the weekends. Persons and goods are held without movement or even detained and forced to pay huge fines at the borders of states carrying out this exercise. And it is really difficult for a traveler or tourist to tell which weekend or even day of the month was safe.

There is no evidence that the monthly sanitation exercises addresses the systemic problems that confront states in maintaining good sanitation and a clean environment. If anything the exercise provides and opportunity for residents to mount huge garbage dumps on major streets, which are then dispersed and scattered, before the government garbage agency is able to clear them out. Of course worsening the problem.

CRP believes that the exercise is taking a huge toll on the economic and social health of the nation and calls on the states involved to cancel it. The states should instead initiate a system of refuse collection and environment cleaning that is sustainable. This would include empowering their refuse collection agencies or encouraging functional private initiatives. 

Even if some states must carry out monthly sanitation exercises, then the date and time needs to be agreed and made uniform across the practicing states.