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 Why Sierra Leone's capital should be worried about Air Pollution?

  • Polluted Freetown

By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay

It’s 5pm at Congo Town in Freetown in the month of May and it’s raining; the place is foggy and dark. Rains do come with fog but not in May. This is not even a fog; it is another thick blanket of smoke that usually envelopes this area and its surrounding.

Abdulai Ferenkeh lives with his family just 50 meters away from the Kingtom dumpsite, which is source of the smoke. Inhaling thick smoke from the dumpsite is a way of life for the Ferenkeh family. Every day or two, fire from the dumpsite generate huge cloud of smoke that covers the whole area.

The Freetown City Council (FCC) is responsible to manage waste in the capital. According to officials, the city has two official dumpsites; the Kingtom dumpsite and the Kissy dumpsite. Tons of unprocessed waste is dumped at these two sites on a weekly basis.

The most common way these wastes are processed is by burning.

For people living around these dumpsites, this is a normalcy of life.

Children play around, whiles their mothers cook and their fathers labor. In the process they all inhale that smoke which is made up of harmful elements.

How bad is it?

Air pollution is one of the most challenging issues relating to the climate change discussion across the world.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says 7 million people die of pollution every year. This figure is staggering! And it illustrate the urgent need to tackle the problem.

The need to tackle air pollution is linked to many of the Sustainable Development Goals; from sustainable environment, to quality of life and climate change itself.

Environment and Social Officer at FCC, Sulaiman Zainu Parker, told Politico that air pollution has been a challenge that the council is grappling with.

“Air pollution has been very much challenging for us as a city. But as a council we have been playing our own role to ensure that we minimize the effect,” said Parker.

In Sierra Leone, air pollution is going on almost unchecked; from the streets to the homes.

The major cooking fuel used in most homes in Sierra Leone are coal and firewood. This high demand is fueled by availability and cost. Compared to other cooking fuel, coal and firewood are readily available and they are cheap.

Like outdoor pollution, this has significant consequences on health. Studies have shown that cooking fuel like wood and coal produces a variety of health-damaging pollutants, including particulate matter (PM), methane, carbon monoxide, polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and volatile organic compounds (VOC). All these can cause respiratory and heart related diseases; from stroke to heart attack. 

WHO says 3.8 million people die of indoor pollution annually.

Ferenkeh and his family are healthy for now, but the longer they are exposed to the smoke, the higher the chances of them getting sick and adding to this number.

In Sierra Leone, it is hard to keep track of how many people have been diagnosed with air pollution related diseases.

This difficulty is mainly associated with poor record management in the public sector.

This year’s World Environment Day celebrations focus was on air pollution. With the theme “Beat Air Pollution”.

Momodu Al-Rashid Bah, a Director at the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) explained some of the areas they will be looking to tackle in order to reduce air pollution in the country.

“We are having challenges with handling our waste. People burn their waste and when you burn your waste, you pollute the air. We are also burning our bushes. Bush fires are very prevalent in the provinces,” said Bah.

EPA says their plan to tackle pollution across the country will focus on four key areas; bush fires, transportation, waste management and cooking fuel.

Bah bemoaned the transportation industry for its contribution to the problem.

“Transport is a major source of air pollution, leading to climate change by emitting carbon and also causing respiratory diseases like bronchitis, asthma and so on,” he said.

He added: “We are getting a lot of emission from our old vehicles. The boats that move from one place to the other; they also emit carbon.”

The Sierra Leone Road Safety Authority (SLRSA) is responsible to register and license vehicles across the country. According to its figures, there are up to 350,000 vehicles across the country. These include tricycles and motorbikes.

They can’t track the number of vehicles in the capital because they don’t register vehicles or motor bikes by town or cities.

All the four areas that the EPA will focus on is a problem that the entire country faces. But Freetown faces much worse in two of these areas; transportation and waste management.

The reason for this is that there is no city or town across the country that is as populated as Freetown. The 2015 census shows that there are more than 2 million people living in the city. This is more than the entire population of districts like Kambia, Falaba and Karene put together.

This increase in population in the capital has been caused by the gross inequality in social services and opportunities across other districts. Since the end of the war, the capital’s population has swollen.

This huge population has powered Freetown’s consumption and waste disposal pattern. It also means more movement and more transportation to facilitate movement.

What is the action plan?

As bad as the problem is, authorities are attempting to do something about it.

Executive Director of SLRSA, David Panda Noah, told Politico about their plans to control pollution in the transport sector.

“We have vehicle examiners that do go around and do checks. As we have approached the rains, the examiners will start to go around again, to check on vehicles. We are also trying to enhance the Motor Testing system, where we check emission from vehicles to ensure that we have low level of harmful gases that these cars produce. We are very concerned about the quality of air we get,” he said.

In addition to these measures, EPA is also taking steps further by pushing for regulations that could give them more powers to act in fixing the problem.

Director Bah said: “We are working with other bodies like Standards Bureau. We have developed air and water quality standards and we are already on regulations. We have already developed some draft regulations.

“Inaction will not help; we need to take action.” He emphasized.

Concerning the dumpsites, there have been calls in the past to relocate them out of the city. But FCC says they have a different plan.

Parker said: “We have realized that as a council we should take action. So, what we have done is to work out arrangement that will transform these dumpsites into a sanitary land fill.”

The FCC and EPA are not the only institution bothered by environmental issues. Independent oranisations like the Conservation of Natural Resources and Culture (CNRC) - Sierra Leone have been looking at various possibilities of fixing the country’s waste management problems.

CNRC earlier this month launched a project which aims to turn waste to wealth.

“We know that if we start to separate waste into compost for fertilizer then we can use it for farming and backyard gardening. We also look at recycling, other African countries are growing speedily as a result of recycling. If we can also recycle our waste, it can give the country a whole lot of income,” Maigore Christan Kallon, the Executive Director of the organization, told Politico.

Kallon’s plan is yet to fully take off, but with the right support, it might. 

There is almost no plan to change the major cooking fuel sources in the country. It is not even a debate that has been brought to the fore.

The right to clean air is a human right. Today, nine out of every ten people in the world seem to have lost that right, including Ferenkeh and his family. But losing it is not the most worrying part. What is more worrying, is giving up on getting that right back.

© 2019 Politico Online

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