Why open defecation should be criminalised – Specialist

Why is the practice of open defecation dangerous?But before you can get to this, you ask questions like; what is wrong with open defecation, how does it affect your life, when people shit in the open, where does the shit go, when you go to shit yourself where people have shit in the open, what […]

Why is the practice of open defecation dangerous?
But before you can get to this, you ask questions like; what is wrong with open defecation, how does it affect your life, when people shit in the open, where does the shit go, when you go to shit yourself where people have shit in the open, what happens, they complain, we step on the shit and we bring back the slippers, some of our crawling children will carry the slippers and start chewing. So they really feel disgusted and said they must do something about it. They make plans for changing that and they begin to allocate responsibilities and set timeline for themselves.
You see a fellow man squatting and because you haven’t done a latrine for your wife, she is squatting in the bush and a man is watching her. And probably in places, you have wine tappers, even hunters and things like that. These are some of the real life experiences that people in the communities have expressed to us as some of their reasons wanting to embrace the construction and use of latrines

What happened to sanitary inspectors we had in the past, would it still work?
Actually there are still sanitary inspectors. But they are so few that they’re no longer having any impact. Most of them are old and they are not employing new ones. As a result of this, if you look at sanitary inspectors across Nigeria, the few that I have met in some of the environmental health officers meetings, most of them are like senior level people.
 They no longer have the will to conduct house to house inspection to draw attention to issues like this. When we were challenged because we are unable to achieve open defecation free (ODF) in small towns, it became an issue that the environmental health officers needed to complement the gentle persuasion that we engaged using Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) by the enforcement of the environmental public health laws. This is an arm that is promoting and persuading gently and there is an arm that is invoking the law because shitting actually in the open is a criminal offence.

How about enforcing the building code to ensure strict compliance with having latrines in buildings?
As a matter of fact, when a building plan is submitted, some of the things that should be checked when you are checking the appropriateness of the building plan will be the area that is available to be built par the adequacy of the facilities compared to the number of bedrooms which we can use to appropriate the number of persons they plan to live in that house.
That means that having toilet facilities is supposed to be a significant thing to check , there should be recommendations to amend that plan to include adequate toilet facilities to meet the projected number of persons that should be living in such a house given the number of living rooms that have been put in.

Do you see Nigeria attaining ODF status in 2025?
That is about 11 years to come. There’s a possibility that this can happen but if we follow the current trend, it’s not likely to happen. Reason being that; we are making good progress in some of the selected states but these are states that external support agencies are providing concentrated resources, where we are providing support, and they are actually rapidly moving from open defecation  communities to open defecation free  communities. About ten years ago, we had less that 2,000 ODF, but as of this month, we have close to 3,500 ODF communities cutting across many states. But the most significant contributors to this are Benue, Cross River, Osun, Jigawa, Katsina, Bauchi and Ekiti. Like I said, it may be because of the amount of attention those states are receiving.

What are you proposing to the government?
What we are proposing is that government should in recognition of the fact that CLTS has proven to be a very effective approach  to improving community sanitation, scale this up, put funds in annual budget that will help relevant agencies to undertake CLTS.
UNICEF has supported in some of these states even in local governments they are not working in, to support other local governments in those states to develop road maps and prepare ODF action plans. To support this, technical people from the non project LGAs have also been trained so that they could actually do this but UNICEF does not have the funds to support the community level activities that may translate into these changes taking place in the non project LGAs. So if government made money available to the non project LGAs to sort of replicate the good practices that are happening in project LGAs, we think we can actually make ODF by 2025. The way forward is for government to take over this and run with it.

Are we making progress in the water-related MDGs?
On a general note, there is a good progress in the direction of access to improved water sources but am not going to be able to say yes or no if we are going to be able to achieve it  by 2015.

What are the effects or challenges to water sanitation implementation in Nigeria?
As you may have observed the statistics of under- five morbidity and mortality is glaring. It has been proven that Nigeria is among the top countries that are contributing to under- five mortality and this is a direct reflection of how well or not our  sanitary and hygiene habits are, including the availability of safe water.