‘Government needs to strengthen environmental inspectors’

What is the mandate of your council?Our mandate is to, among other things, make the environment acceptable and conducive health wise or tame the environment to ensure that those things that can affect health are reduced as much as possible. These are concerns which range from what everybody can see such as waste collection and […]

What is the mandate of your council?
Our mandate is to, among other things, make the environment acceptable and conducive health wise or tame the environment to ensure that those things that can affect health are reduced as much as possible. These are concerns which range from what everybody can see such as waste collection and disposal to the ones people do not notice which include environmental sanitation be it on the road, offices, parks, residences, and the protection of the general environment.

Is your enabling law strong enough to enable you carry out your mandate?
Our enabling law is Act no 11 of 2002. When it was enacted, it was a beautiful legislation but after some years, we found out that it was not so perfect so the National Assembly is in the process of amending it to comply with realities of the modern day. Remember you won’t know if a law is strong until you start testing it.

So are you saying the current law undergoing amendment is not strong enough for you to carry out your mandate?
Yes, it is not strong enough; we have seen so many cases exposing the limitations of the law. For instance, the law says EHRCON has the mandate of regulating environmental health profession in the country, and when you look at what constitutes the profession of environmental health, areas such as waste collection, cleaning services, pest control are all sanitation components of the profession and when we open a register for those in this business to be registered, they don’t agree so it will require a High Court ruling to compel them because they don’t see themselves as practicing in the area of environmental health. It’s just like someone in the construction of roads and buildings saying he is not in the business of engineering. So, we have to ask the federal high court to interpret. We still have challenges from many of the professionals and this is compounded by the fact that we cannot litigate directly. As a council, we have little bureaucy and believe that it will be faster for us to carry out criminal prosecution against offenders. We still need to take our case to the Attorney General to request for fiat but this is not always as fast as we would have loved it to be.

Are your responsibilities limited to the federal level?
As an organisation established by a federal legislation, our duties as a council are limited to every state in Nigeria and to the people we regulate. As a council, we have nothing to do with individuals, even if they live in dirty environments, but the environmental health officers whom we regulate deal directly with these individuals. It is their responsibilities to ensure that people keep their residences clean; there are some areas where people channel faeces from their houses directly into the public drain, it is criminal. However, it is not the job of the council but that of the environmental health officers to deal with such situations. But the challenge is that we don’t have enough of these officers and this is a great issues as in some states they are as few as 5. In Abuja, they are less than 50 registered sanitary inspectors, in a profession that the WHO says we should have a ratio of 1 to 8000 but currently in Nigeria in some states it is 1 to 200,000. This has led to people calling for the re-introduction of sanitary inspectors but this services have never been withdrawn so emphasis should be on strengthening their services. Today, more that 80 percent of the sanitary inspectors registered across the country are above the ages of 50, meaning that in the next 10 years we are going to be losing about 80 per cent of them to retirement and this is not funny as their duties cannot be done by any other persons.

Are you saying we don’t have the needed sanitary inspectors to ensure a healthy environment?
Not that we don’t have, currently there are only 7000 registered sanitary inspectors caring for the over 150 million Nigerians and 80 per cent of this workforce are over the ages of 50. This has a direct relationship with the diseases killing Nigerians. Because the needed sanitation level for a healthy society is not met, we are having outbreaks of chorea and other diseases which are as a result of dirty environment.
Nigeria today is as bad as London in 1985. More than two hundred years ago Britain had a great cholera epidemic that killed a lot of people. In our own case people are well today, tomorrow they are sick with diseases like malaria caused by mosquito, cholera which is caused by improper defecation (publicly).      
If you drive from A.Y.A to Madala, you will not see any public toilet that is accessible to the public and it is not supposed to be so but where is our enforcement? The people meant to enforce them are the environmental health officers. Public health is for everybody and by everybody. The work of sanitary inspectors is crucial.

Who employs or trains the environmental health officers?
There are various schools across the country that train the environmental health officers up to HND levels. The sanitary inspector is employed by the authority in charge; the Ministry of Environment or Health. Environmental Health Officers are trained to do the work they do; there are many diseases that are preventive. Let’s look at food sanitation and safety in all those gardens that open between 7 pm and 12 am. You see a system where environmental health officers should work in shift; so as to know the health status of the people cooking. If there are diseases in these people who cook and sell, you are meant to know their health status and issue them licenses and these registration is done by the environmental health local government councils.

What roles are the states playing in ensuring a sound and healthy environment?
They are supposed to be major stakeholders but only pay lip service to preventive health. Rather than scale up their activities and work towards situations that would prevent the disease, they are more interested in procurement of drugs. If for instance there is no open defecation in the country, the possibilities of cholera outbreaks will be drastically reduced.